


Clouds

by thesoulsailor



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Blow Jobs, Break Up, Denial of Feelings, Enemies to Lovers, Famous Michael, First Kiss, First Time, Getting Back Together, Growing Up Together, Hand Jobs, Happy Ending, Hate Sex, M/M, Ordinary Luke, Rimming, Rock Stars, Sexual Experimentation, Teenage Rebellion, feelings all over the place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-07-18 11:19:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 54,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7313128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesoulsailor/pseuds/thesoulsailor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>And Luke got it. He got why all these teenage girls bought concert tickets and t-shirts and wrote Future Mrs Clifford on their arms. In all reality, Michael was breath-taking. Michael was oozing the perfect mixture of self-confidence and gentleness and something indescribable, incredibly intriguing, that differentiated him from all the other talented guitar-players out there. Michael was a true rockstar. Always had been.</i>
  <br/>
  <i>Luke kept silent as he averted his gaze back to his hands, placed the now dry cup to the right of the sink and took the next one. He said, “I thought that the last time we talked I told you that I never want to see you again.”</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>or</p><p>Michael is famous, Luke is not and after a year and thirteen weeks of silence, Michael is willing to do anything to get his forever back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For Cat, who waited a year and thirteen weeks for this fic.
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** This is a work of complete fiction. This work does not reflect upon the real life people mentioned in this fictional story, and the non-fictive people named are not affiliated with this story in any way. The story and its characters belong to me. Do not repost anywhere and do not print/distribute.

**“Well I know when you're around ‘cause I know the sound  
** **I know the sound of your heart”** **  
** **\- The Sound // The 1975**  

The day it all went to hell was a low spring day. The sky was one, pale grey, gusts of wind tousling leaves through the streets. It was dry out by now, but it had drizzled in the morning so the few cars speeding through the side street that the coffee shop Luke’s parents owned was located in caused splashes of water to crash onto the pavement.

The lunchtime inrush had been over for about half an hour and Luke was busy drying the cups he had just rinsed, humming along to the radio playing some 70’s rock. He was waiting for Will to show up and join him in the afternoon shift. This way he didn’t pay much attention when the bell above the door tingled. Luke looked up, however, when he heard a certain, familiar voice that shouldn’t be familiar anymore laugh. And his stomach dropped somewhere to his knees.

It was like a damn soap opera, really, the way Michael Clifford stomped back into his life, with heavy boots splattering mud from the outside onto the wooden flooring Luke had scrubbed a mere hour ago. Michael was wearing ripped skinny jeans and a rugged looking leather jacket covering a band shirt full of holes. His hair was bleached blond now, had been lavender the last time Luke had checked. Stubble lined Michael's jaw, the kind of ink that didn’t come off when you put water on it splattered over his pale hands. He was not alone, two other boys flanking him. His bandmates, Luke recognised them from the magazine covers he always avoided when he waited at the cash register of their local Coles.

Luke casted his gaze down the moment Michael’s hands came up to lift the aviators from his eyes and he began to survey the modestly cramped coffee shop. Luke didn’t need to look at a photo or poster from a teen magazine to know Michael’s eyes. Michael’s eyes he remembered, always changing between green and blue. Lips pressing into a tight line, Luke focussed on the cup he was towelling dry.

“Luke Hemmings.”

His name. His name were the first words Michael Clifford spoke to him after a year and thirteen weeks of silence. It was enough to make Luke’s eyes snap up. Michael was standing in front of the counter now, hip leaned against the steely tabletop, eyes bright with unrightful joy and that hint of insolence to his smile, that had everybody always question his true motives. True motives and thoughts and secrets, that used to be shared with Luke, and Luke only.

And Luke got it. He got why all these teenage girls bought concert tickets and t-shirts and wrote _Future Mrs Clifford_ on their arms. In all reality, Michael was breath-taking. The bleach-blond boy was oozing the perfect mixture of self-confidence and gentleness and something indescribable, incredibly intriguing, that differentiated him from all the other talented guitar-players out there. Michael was a true rockstar. Always had been.

Luke kept silent as he averted his gaze back to his hands, placed the now dry cup to the right of the sink and took the next one.

He said, “I thought that the last time we talked I told you that I never want to see you again.”

Luke could hear a low gasp, but it was not Michael. It was one of his bandmates, the one with wild, light brown curls being tamed by a bandana (which - really? did he think he was Bret Michaels? Out of the corner of his eyes, Luke could see Michael’s unbothered smile falter. It felt good. Luke shot bandana boy a mirthless smile - he didn’t see any reason why he should be friendly - before he looked back down, stacking the cup in his hands onto the other dry one and fishing the next one out of the sink.

“Yeah,” Michael sounded a lot more sober now. His voice had gotten deeper as well, matured. “I remember that.”

“Good.” Luke kept his expression impassive, feigned to be as disinterested as he could manage. And was this really happening? This couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t right. It couldn’t be real.

“Lukey.”

The almost pleading hint in Michael’s voice was what made Luke’s blood boil. Michael had no right to be anything but sad because Luke was acting cold towards him. Michael had no right to be here in the first place, he hadn’t. Michael needed to be far away, on other continents, living the rockstar life he had chosen, while Luke lived his. That was the deal.

“Oh, no!” Luke plunked the cup he was polishing onto the counter. The force made the porcelain crack, but Luke couldn’t bring himself to care. Ignoring the slight sting from where a splinter had cut into his palm, he raised his finger.

“Don’t you dare ‘Lukey’ me. You have no right to call me that name. In fact, you don’t have the right to say my name at all. I don’t know what goddamn idea struck on you that you think you can come back- that you can march in here after _a year_ and even look at me, but I’m telling you right now, that you can’t. Leave! Get the fuck out of here! Now, before I call the police.”

Luke felt the rest of the customers start to ogle at them as his voice grew in volume but he couldn’t be bothered. All he cared about was the way Michael flinched, flinched as if Luke hit him. He hoped it hurt.

“Luke, please,” Michael glanced nervously around the room. “Can we talk? Somewhere else?”

And Luke was _so_ close to surging over the counter and strangling him.

That was when Will showed up.

“Oi, everything alright here?”

The good thing was, that Will was older. Well, not that old, twenty-three, which made him only four years older than Luke and three years older than Michael, but he did look old. Will was buff, arms bulging nicely under the white barista long sleeve shirt, dark eyes gentle but firm as he stepped out of the backroom. 

“Yeah, everything’s perfect,” Luke pressed out through gritted teeth.

“He’s right,” that came from the boy to Michael’s right. He was all shades of raven hair, brown skin and ebony-coloured eyes, currently fixed on Luke. His gaze held such intensity that Luke felt his stomach churn for a moment. Then the raven-haired boy looked away, to Will. “We were just about to leave, no biggie.”

With that he grabbed Wannabe Bret Michaels and Michael by their respective arms and dragged them out of the shop. The moment the door fell close behind them, Luke positively collapsed.

Will caught him. “Shit, Luke, what’s wrong?”

Cursing under his breath, the older boy helped him into the backroom, lowering him down on the nearest crate.

“Who the hell was that?”

“No one,” Luke muttered and pressed the palms of his hands together, wiped his nose with the back of his right. “No one.”  


**“I tell my story in reverse ‘cause it hurts  
** **‘Cause it hurts to bare”  
** ****\- Reverse // SomeKindaWonderful****

It was an exceptionally hot summer day and Michael was sprawled out on the lawn behind his house, just squinting at the sky. The five year-old had scavenged a freeze pop from the freezer, his third that day despite the fact that his mum had prohibited him from eating more than one a day. But Michael knew that his mum wouldn’t be home until the short clockhand would point to the five on his Pokémon watch, so he still had a couple of hours time to come up with an excuse why the box with the ice was already half empty.

Michael had just victoriously ripped the corner of the plastic open with his teeth when he heard the rumbling. It was a rumbling like the one that woke Michael every Tuesday morning when the garbage truck drove through his street and poured all the trash from the trash cans into the back of the truck. Curiously, Michael sat up and peeked around the edge of his house. There was a truck, just as big as the garbage one but definitely not as smelly, that had just pulled up to Mrs Sullivan’s house. Mrs Sullivan herself, Michael knew because his mother had told him, was in a house for old people now and her own house had been empty ever since.

Michael scrambled to his feet, just in the same moment the doors of the truck opened and two men in white dungarees and yellow caps on their heads jumped out. Holding the freeze pop with his teeth, Michael skipped the few metres to the tree that stood between the two houses and hid behind the stem. From his new spot behind the tree, Michael had an uninhibited view of the Sullivans’ front yard. The men in the dungarees had walked to the back of the truck and pulled its back wall open, revealing heaps of furniture.

In front of the truck, having gone unnoticed by Michael until now, a car had stopped. The front doors opened and Michael watched a woman about the age of his mom get out of the passenger seat. Her long, blonde hair fluttered in the wind, a stern, but not unfriendly smile on her face as she looked around and then took the hand of the man that had driven the car. He reminded Michael of his dad, despite the fact that the new man had hair and his dad didn’t. A second later, Michael's attention got caught by the back door of the car opening and a pile of boys falling out.

At first, Michael thought them to be triplets because they looked so alike. They were all scrawny, with mobs of blond hair and matching khaki shorts. Then Michael noticed that they weren’t equally tall. The two older brothers looked like they were about the age of Michael’s cousin. Michae’s cousin was already in the last grade of elementary school and the tallest boy looked old enough to maybe even having started middle school.

Michael bit his lip, squinted as he watched the two bigger boys kick a ball around the front lawn, the youngest brother doomed to run in between them. The eldest seemed to enjoy kicking the ball away every time the youngest brother came close to touching it. Eventually, the smaller brother seemed to have caught on that his big brothers were playing him and he dropped to the ground right where he stood, sat himself down Indian style and watched his brothers play instead of trying to play with them. His short, chubby fingers raked through the lawn and ripped out chunks of grass.

Without lifting his eyes from the boy, Michael picked up the freeze pop from where the plastic was slowly but surely cutting open the corners of his mouth. He bit off a good chunk of the cherry-flavoured ice, let it slide into his mouth and chewed before he suspended the wrapping back between his teeth. Michael lost track of time quickly. Hidden away behind the tree, Michael watched as the men in the dungarees and the man that had arrived in the car carried the furniture from the truck into the house, directed by the blonde woman. It was interesting, probably the most interesting thing that had happened to him all summer (and that included the new Super Mario game for his Gameboy that Michael had gotten from his dad.)

At one point, the adults disappeared into the house, though, and Michael could see the blonde woman hand out the same brown bottles his dad drank from whenever they went to a barbecue at the Stevensons’ house. Shortly after, the woman called out for the boys in the front yard and, kicking the ball into the open garage, the two older brothers ran off into the house. The youngest, having to pull himself to his feet first, got up much slower. That was when Michael saw his chance.

Careful to keep the freeze pop between his teeth, Michael ran along the fence as fast as his legs would carry him. He slithered to a halt as soon as he could be seen from the front yard.

“Hey!” he called out and hoisted himself onto the iron fence. With one feet dangling over each end, Michael balanced himself by wrapped his hands around the top bar of the fence and locked his gaze on the youngest brother.

The other boy’s head whipped up upon Michael’s call. He looked around with a confused expression on his face for a moment before he seemed to spot Michael. The confusion on his face faded into timid curiosity and Michael watched, pleased, as the blond boy took a step forward. Now that he had gotten closer, Michael could see the colour of his eyes. They were blue, like his favourite sugar paper from preschool and Michael smiled. He waved the other boy closer. Hesitantly, the boy took another step forward and then he was walking towards Michael, his hands clutching the hem of his shirt.

“I’m Michael,” Michael said, past the freeze pop still hanging from his mouth, once the boy had come to a halt in front of him.

“Luke,” the boy with the huge blue eyes gave back and Michael sighed. The boy obviously needed help to talk and since no one else but Michael was around, he would have to be the one to do it. Michael didn’t mind, though. It was nice, finally having someone else living in the same street as him. Except from Michael and his parents, all the other people that lived in the houses around were almost as old as Mrs Sullivan. And Luke’s brothers were too old to pay attention to Michael. No, Michael knew that Luke was going to be his new friend.

Michael took the freeze pop out of his mouth and held it out, “Do you want one? There’s still two in the freezer left.”

Luke looked at him, looked back at the house where his brothers had disappeared and then he nodded at Michael.

“Cool,” Michael nodded and jumped off the fence, starting towards the side door of his house that led directly into the kitchen. He stopped when he saw Luke struggling to climb over the fence, his arms barely reaching over the metal bar on the top of it. Michael waited until Luke had finally heaved himself over to the other side and he had landed on the lawn of Michael’s own backyard before he made a beeline for the side door that lead into the kitchen. Michael hoped Luke liked cherry flavour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *rubs hands* We're back!! And I'm really, really excited to share this one with you. I wrote down the outline for this fic over a year ago and to finally be able to write it makes me buzz. As always, I'm eternally grateful for any and all feedback. The official playlist can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/1146343083/playlist/38Hppwc6cbA6cDhc4bioK1). Tumblr/twitter is @mikeykink as usual. All the love, Carly xx


	2. Chapter 2

**“And you’ve got a lot to say  
** **For the one that walked away”  
** **\- Stay With Me // You Me At Six**

 

“Hey, mom!”

Luke greeted his mother with a kiss on the cheek as he walked into the kitchen. Outside of the kitchen window, he could see the sun set, the street lamps flickering to life.

“Closed everything up?” Liz asked from where she was busy peeling potatoes for dinner.

“Yes, mother.” Luke rolled his eyes.

“Mhm,” Liz looked up and eyed him with a deprecating frown. “Something happen?”

And how did his mother even do that? Luke thought about lying for a moment, but then he accepted his fate. He took one of the knives out of the block and picked up a potato.

“Michael came into the shop today.”

Liz blinked at him, “Who?”

“Michael,” his name tasted like acid on Luke’s tongue, “Michael Clifford.”

“Oh.” Liz’s eyes grew wide. “He’s come back?”

“It appears so.".

“I’m sorry, honey.” Luke looked up when his mother plucked the knife and vegetable out of his hands, placed them carefully on the counter before she enclosed Luke’s hands with her own. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Luke smiled at her reassuringly, fighting against the overwhelming urge to run up into his room, just so he wouldn’t have to endure the concern in her eyes any longer. “I told him that I want nothing to do with him and he left.”

“Good, that’s good. Your dad and I planned to go out for dinner tonight, but if you want us to stay, we could-”

“Oh no, Mum!” Luke shook his head. “No, it’s really fine. Will’s coming to pick me up in half an hour anyways.”

“Okay,” Liz relented and released his hands. Then she turned to look out of the kitchen window. “I mean, I saw lights in the Cliffords’ old house, but I never would have thought… It’s been such a long time.”

“I have to go get ready,” Luke said and took a step backwards. His mother was still looking out of the window, her eyebrows slightly furrowed, when Luke turned around and made his way out of the kitchen. Once he had closed the door to his room behind him, Luke let himself fall back against the varnished wood, took a couple of deep breaths. Then he pushed himself off and strut over to his wardrobe.

Will hadn’t specified where they were going for dinner, but Luke knew Will well enough to know that Luke was on the safe side if he dressed to impress. Will never chose a cheap place to take Luke out to. It was one of the reasons why Luke had said yes to him when the other man had asked him out for the first time. Will always made sure that Luke felt appreciated, worth a thirty dollar plate of pasta even if they were both living off of a barista’s wage.

Luke had just pulled one of his two dress shirts from its hanger when movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. It seemed almost surreal to Luke as he turned his head to find the window opposing his illuminated. The thing was that Luke had waited for that to happen. He had waited for over a year for the empty darkness in Michael’s window to light up and now that it had, Luke felt his heart sink.

Michael was standing in front of his dresser, must have just emerged from the en suite bathroom that Luke knew was located right next to it. He was naked, would have been completely naked if it weren’t for the towel wrapped around his hips. Even from the distance and through two windows Luke could make out the drops of water that were dripping from Michael’s wet hair and running down his skin. He had gotten broader, his soft edges hardened out, not completely, but Michael wasn’t a boy anymore. Then, neither was Luke.

Michael was standing with his back towards the window and Luke needed to look away, but he couldn’t. Completely frozen in place, he watched as Michael rummaged through the top drawer of his dresser, retrieved a pair of grey boxer briefs that were familiar to Luke, even though Luke really wished they weren’t. He could feel his heartbeat go erratic as Michael’s hand disappeared in front of his body and then the towel was falling, taking Luke’s heart rate with it.

Luke’s breath hitched as Michael turned around, offering Luke a full frontal view. Clutching the underwear in his hand, Michael took a step further into the room, closer to the window. And then Michael looked up. A slow, terrible smirk made the corners of his mouth curl upwards as he met Luke’s eyes.

It was then that Luke realised his ceiling lights were on and Michael could see him staring. And it was around then that Luke realised he had fallen victim to a scheme. Michael had known that Luke was there. Michael had played him.

Because Michael Clifford didn’t strut around his room in only a towel. Michael Clifford always took his fresh clothes with him into the bathroom and changed there, because Michael Clifford hated the feeling of cold air attacking his bare skin whenever he stepped out of the steamy bathroom.

The realisation was tinder for the fire in the pit of Luke’s stomach. It had almost been squashed, momentarily, by the sight of Michael back in his room, in his house, where Luke had hoped he would appear for a year. But Michael hadn’t and after a year Luke had stopped looking at the window and focussed on his own life instead. And now, he had Will.

Hitting the light switch of his room with his fist as he stormed out, Luke fled into the bathroom. Willing the incessant hammering of his heart to stop, he changed out of his coffee-stained work clothes. Luke doused himself in deodorant before he put on the dress shirt and then turned to fix his hair. Shortly after, he could hear the doorbell ring and Luke made his way back downstairs, spreading the last of wax in his hair.

Luke opened the door. “Hey,” he greeted Will, who smiled at him.

Throwing on his jacket and feeling his pockets for wallet and keys, Luke called out a quick goodbye to his mum and stepped out onto the front porch. Luke found that he had been right to go for a dress shirt. Will himself was clad in a snug grey sweater, contrasting nicely with his dark skin, and fitted slacks that had been ironed. They were definitely  going somewhere fancy.

“Where are we going?” Luke asked as they walked to the car.

“It’s a surprise,” Will grinned, “but it involves food, so I’m sure you’ll like it.”

“Ah, geez, you know me so well,” Luke fanned himself as he pulled the passenger door of Will’s hatchback open.

Will reciprocated grinned at him as he settled into the driver’s seat and Luke’s smile widened. It was easy, being with Will. They worked well together.

The restaurant turned out to be a small Italian place. As soon as Will had given his last name to the hostess, she lead them to a small, round table near the windows. She took their drink orders before she lit the candle in the middle of the table and left them to retrieve the menu cards.

“For the record, this is very romantic,” Luke remarked as he flipped the menu open.

“Only the best for you,” Will winked at him and took the hand Luke had rested on the table.

As soon as the waitress had taken their orders, Will leaned forward, a glint of concern appearing in his eyes and Luke knew what was coming, even before Will opened his mouth.

“So,” the other man began and squeezed the hand of Luke’s he was still holding, “do you want to tell me what happened today? Who was that guy? Because I could swear I’ve seen his face before somewhere but-”

“His name is Michael,” Luke interrupted and lifted his glass of wine to his lips. “He used to live next to me but now he doesn’t anymore. It doesn’t matter who he is, really.”

Will furrowed his brows, “Really, because you seemed pretty shook and if he’s giving you any trouble...”

“He’s not,” Luke sighed, “giving me trouble. Please, don’t worry about him or me, okay? I swear, it’s fine.”

Luke plastered the most sincere smile onto his face that he could muster. Will searched his eyes for a moment, then he nodded and leaned back, picked up his own glass of wine. Luke felt relieved as he watched Will clink their glasses together in a silent toast.

“Alright then. I just want you to know that you can tell me when something bothers you, or someone. I’m your boyfriend, I’ll help you deal with it.”

“I know,” Luke smiled. “Thank you.”

After that, Will told him about the internship he was thinking about applying for in autumn and Luke found himself relaxing after a couple of minutes. He hadn’t lied to Will. Michael wasn’t giving Luke any trouble. Luke wouldn’t let him. Determinedly, Luke banned every thought of the other man and focussed on Will in front of him, instead.

The rest of the evening went by easily and it was nearing midnight by the time they left the restaurant. They spent the drive back to Luke’s in amicable silence, Luke humming along to the radio from time to time. Will took his hand again once he had pulled up to the curb in front of Luke’s house. He got out of the car as well when Luke pushed the passenger door open and walked Luke to the door. Will always insisted on doing that. He was what his mum called “a proper gentleman.” The house itself lay in darkness, the car of Luke’s parents still gone from the driveway. 

As soon as they had reached the front door, Will turned towards him, “I really enjoyed tonight.”

“Me too,” Luke gave back, earnestly and pulled his hand out of the other man’s to feel for his keys.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then. The street party starts at seven, right?”

“Yeah,” Luke turned back to him and Will smiled. Then Will leaned in, placing a single kiss on Luke’s cheek that left Luke grinning like a fool.

“Have a good night, Luke.”

“Safe drive home!” Luke called after Will as the other man began to make his way down the porch and back to his car.  Will waved at him before he drove away.

“How cute.”

Luke startled and nearly tripped over himself in his haste to spin around.

“What the fuck?” he asked a smiling Michael, who was casually sitting on the Hollywood swing on Luke’s front porch.

“No really,” Michael assured him, his voice sickengly sweet as he pulled himself to his feet, taking a step towards Luke, “that was really cute. The way he almost hit your lips with his and then you only gave him the cheek that was just,” Michael sighed dramatically, “so _cute._ ”

Luke felt his muscles tense with anger at the insolence dripping from Michael’s every word, seemingly oozing from his skin. He wanted to yell at Michael, wipe the darn front porch steps with his annoying smile, but Luke couldn’t think of where to start, so he was left fish-mouthing at Michael for a couple of seconds before he gave up.

“Get the fuck off my porch,” Luke growled in lack of a better idea and turned towards the door, jamming the key into the lock.

“Oh, c’mon, Lukey-”

“Didn’t I tell you to not call me that?”

“Fine, _Luke_ , can I please come in? I wanted to talk to you if you recall this afternoon when I-”

“You’re not invited to come in,” Luke snapped at Michael before he pushed the front door open and stepped through, hastily throwing the door shut behind hum. Except, Michael had caught the door and squeezed himself through. And like that he was in Luke’s house, wiping his shoes on the door mat like Luke had seen him do hundreds if not thousands of times before. And Luke wanted to be surprised, but he really wasn’t. Michael had never been good with prohibitions.

Luke felt his blood boil at the innocent smile Michael shot him and turned around with a huff. Luke walked straight into the kitchen, turning on the faucet of the kitchen sink and squeezing dish soap into the basin. If Michael wanted to besiege his house, Luke thought, he might as well be productive and do the dishes. Somehow, Luke noticed, he always found himself rinsing cups in the presence of Michael these days. And that he even could think of Michael and the present in the same sentence was enough to make Luke scrub the cup in his hands so hard he nearly took of the “World’s Best Teacher” lettering.

“I like the new colour scheme,” Luke could hear Michael call from the living room. “Burgundy was a good choice. It mixes well with the green curtains. But Liz always had a hand for that. Speaking of…”

Luke flinched when Michael’s voice was closer suddenly, in the same room as him, “... where are your parents?”

Luke focussed on washing out the cup in his hands for several seconds before he realised Michael wouldn’t move on without an answer.

He sighed, “They are our for dinner. It’s their anniversary today.”

“Ah,” Michael answered, “is it the fourth of September yet?”

“Michael,” Luke set the cup in his hands down and looked up to find the other man already looking at him, brows raised expectantly. Luke withstood the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “What do you want?”

Michael blinked at him, obviously surprised by the calm tone to Luke’s voice.

“Because,” Luke continued, “as far as I know you are supposed to be on the other half of the world, in LA or wherever, being a rockstar and all that. You moved your parents out of their house over a half year ago. Shit, I didn’t even know it still belonged to you. And then your band is here as well? I’m just... what do you want?”

“We’re writing on our second album," Michael wet his bottom lip with his tongue and Luke couldn’t stand to look at him anymore. He turned away, curled his hands around the edge of the basin. "This is a banding retreat." 

Luke watched the water in the basin ripple, the soap bubbles slowly but surely bursting away.

“You’re lying to me.” He didn’t ask it as a question.

A moment later, Luke felt the air in the room move and for a second he thought that Michael was leaving. Then he felt Michael’s arms wrap around him from behind, his chest pressing against Luke’s back. Luke’s head whipped up. Aghast, he started at Michael’s pale arms in the reflection of the kitchen window, resting on his stomach.

“Michael,” Luke warned him.

“Please.” Michael’s voice was so meek, all the cockiness gone. What was left was so bare that Luke had to ban the sound from his brain, force himself to forget it. “It’s been so long. Please, just let me hold you for a moment.”

“Okay.”

The word had come out before Luke had even had time to think about it. He let his eyes flutter shut. One hug, one hug would be okay, Luke figured. Then he would kick Michael out. Carefully, Luke let himself back into Michael’s embrace. Michael hugged him tightly, the familiar smell of shower gel and that special, ridiculously over-prized shampoo Michael used for his dyed hair wafting into Luke’s nose. Luke didn’t know how long they remained like this. There were so many thoughts running through his mind that Luke couldn’t pick out a single one.

That was until he felt Michael’s lips press against the back of his neck, a single open-mouthed kiss against the heated skin of his nape. Luke went rigid.

“I’ve got a boyfriend now, Michael.”  

Luke could feel Michael’s breath against his neck as he exhaled, “I know.”

Luke swallowed. His heart was racing so fast Luke thought it would jump out of his rib cage. Several moments of silence passed.

“I came here to get you back, Luke.”

Luke bared his teeth at his own reflection. “I know.”

Luke did. He had known it the very moment Michael had set foot into the coffee shop. Another couple of beats of silence passed.

“How long have you known him?”

Luke felt his jaw set as he answered quietly, “Four months.”

“Four months,” Michael repeated. He didn’t raise his voice while he spoke, almost mumbled his words into Luke’s skin. It was such a contrary to the way he had been before, loud and invincible, that Luke almost felt nauseous. But he heard the danger beneath. Michael hadn’t gone quiet because Luke had changed his mind.

“See, he’s had you for four months. But I had you for fourteen years, Luke. I do not care for him. I do not care that you wanna play house with him. If that’s what you feel you need right now, do it.”

Luke could feel the flames in his stomach flare, “Isn’t that a bit contradictive of you to say?”

He could hear Michael chuckle and Luke hated the disparaging tone to his voice, hated how absolutely sure of himself Michael was.

“I’m sorry, I should have been clearer. What I'm saying is that I'm not going to leave, Luke. I am here to fight for you. I am absolutely willing to do what’s necessary and I will win. As long as there are clouds in the sky -”

Luke exhaled, his hands shaking as he balled them into fists, dug his nails into the palms of his hands.

“- you and I will be together. So you can hold his hand and he can kiss your cheek but I’ve seen the way you look at him, Luke, and I know that you don’t love him. You looked more excited when your mom got you that bunny for your eighth birthday, even thought you knew you were allergic. But you love me.”

Luke felt his jaw drop slightly as Michael’s hand lifted from his stomach and settled on his heart where it was hammering against his ribcage. Luke knew that Michael could feel that. Luke hated him.

“You love me as much as I love you. I love you. And I will win,” Michael repeated, the words rolling off his tongue like a promise, and like that he was taking a step back, his arms falling from Luke’s body. Luke was still staring out of the kitchen window when he could hear the kitchen door open and shut again. Slowly, blinded, Luke placed his hand on his heart, slotted his fingers into the burning imprint Michael had left. **  
**  


**“If you’re broken I will mend you** **  
****And I’ll keep you sheltered from the storm”** **  
** **\- Lego House // Ed Sheeran**

 

A strained huff escaped Michael as he swung his leg over the fence gate that stood between his own garden and the Hemmings’. Of course, it would have been easier to just open the gate and walk through it, but Michael was six years old and therefore using the gate like anyone else simply wouldn’t do.

He skipped the short way across the Hemmings’ garden and climbed onto the weathered stone wall that was separating the Hemmings’ back yard from the wild willow behind it. Through the floor-length windows of the Hemmings’ living room he could see Liz vacuum. Michael waved at her when she looked up. Luke’s mother raised her eyebrows as she saw him hanging in her garden with half a leg, but then she was waving back, an amused smile playing on her lips before she turned back to vacuuming.

Michael swung his remaining leg over the wall and jumped off. Pushing the high grass out of the way with his arms, Michael weaved his way deeper into the willow, taking the familiar steps until he had reached the patio-sized, round circle where the grass had been trampeled down.

Michael felt the corners of his mouth tug up into a smile as he spotted Luke’s familiar figure sitting on the grass already. His smile faded into a frown, however, when he saw that Luke’s shoulders were shaking. Michael outright scowled when he heard the low, but unmistakeable sound of sobbing.

“Luke!” he called out and tripped the remaining few metres to his friend. He let himself fall onto his knees in front of Luke, wrapping his hands around Luke’s small wrists to pull the blond boy’s hands from his face. “What happened?”

To Michael’s surprise, Luke didn’t curl into himself further but rather surged forward and a second later, Michael was sitting on his butt, Luke’s knees digging uncomfortably into his thighs as the younger boy clung to him.

“Michael,” Luke wrenched out and Michael, in lack of a better idea, patted him on the back like he had seen his mother do when her friend’s poodle had died.

“It’s okay,” Michael mused, trying to recall the words his mother had said. “It’s going to be fine. You can always get a new dog.”

“What?” Luke asked as he pulled away, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

“Nothing,” Michael waved him off quickly. He patted Luke on the hand. “Why are you crying, Lukey?”

“Oh,” Luke pulled up his nose. Michael frowned when Luke wouldn’t look at him.

“Luke,” Michael tried to look as trustworthy as possible as he forced Luke to look at him. “We’re best friends, yeah? You can tell me.”

“It’s stupid,” Luke muttered, shrugging.

“It’s not stupid if it makes you sad. Please, tell me.” Michael tried hard not to seem too impatient. His curiosity was burning in his belly with such intensity that it made his muscles twitch. He wanted to shake Luke to get him to talk, but Michael kept his hands still. Shaking him a little wouldn’t work on Luke. It would only make Luke upset with Michael and Michael hated it when Luke was upset with him.

“It’s just…” Luke sighed, finally and Michael leaned closer. “School is starting soon so Mum went shopping with Jack because he ripped his school blazer and I went with them and Jack kept talking about how excited he was for school to start again. I asked him why and he said that that’s because you find so many new friends in school, so many that he didn’t even miss his old friends from our old town and that I should be excited when I can go to school in a year because I will find a lot of new friends too and….”

Luke looked up at him with tears welling in his eyes.

“... and you start school this year.”

Michael felt his gut clench funnily as he understood why Luke looked at him with fear swimming in his eyes. Furrowing his brows, Michael took the other boy’s hands. Not because he shared Luke’s fear, but because it was so ridiculous.

“Listen, elementary school will totally suck, yeah?“ Luke’s eyes widened momentarily at the bad word Michael had used before he bit his lip. Michael continued, “I have to wear an uniform and it’s going to be all icky and I will only think about how jealous I am because you can play on the jungle jim while I have to sit in a,” Michael let his voice drop down low, widened his eyes into a horrified expression, “classroom.”

“You,” Luke titled his head to the side, visibly confused now, “you mean school will be bad?”

“School is the very worst,” Michael reassured Luke. “And even if I will find lots of new friends like Jack said, you’ll will always be my best friend, okay?”

Slowly, but surely, Luke’s frown turned upwards into a smile, “Okay.”

Michael smiled back and squeezed Luke’s hands, then he tilted his head back so he could look up. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Luke mimic his action.

“See all those clouds, Lukey?”

“Yeah. This one looks like a sheep!”

“It does,” Michael mused and then he looked back down, caught Luke’ gaze. He disentangled one of his hands out of Luke’s grip in favour of brushing the blonde locks out of his best friend’s eyes. Luke grinned at him, weakly and Michael was determined to make even the last of uncertainty vanish from his face.

“As long as there are clouds in the sky,” he said, “you and I will be together.”

After a moment of hesitation, Luke held out his pinkie finger. “Do you promise?”

Michael smiled and curled his own pinkie around Luke’s. “I promise.”


	3. Chapter 3

**“It’s in the eyes** **  
** **I can tell you will always be danger”  
** **\- Snake Eyes // Mumford & Sons  
**

**  
** Luke was already sweating when he woke up. The sun was shining brightly through his window, tickling his back. Groaning at the sticky feeling of his skin, Luke rolled himself out of bed and stalked over to the window, ripped it open as wide as he could. He shed his shirt before he grabbed his sunglasses, headphones and went downstairs.

As soon as Luke had entered the kitchen, he made a beeline for the fridge. A silent prayer of gratitude left his lips as he saw that his mother had already crammed several bottles of water into the bottom space. Luke grabbed two and threw the fridge door back shut. He found a note sticking to the fridge door, informing him that his mother had gone grocery shopping while his father was managing the coffee shop.  

Content that he had the day off, Luke gulped down the first bottle of water on his way outside. The sun was beating down mercilessly and Luke flinched as the smouldering bricks of the terrace burned his feet. Hastily, he skipped over to the lawn and dropped himself onto the blanket that was already waiting for him there.

Luke put on his sunglasses, propped his earphones into his ears and turned his music on loud. The neighbours were holding a street fest tonight, which would mean a lot of old people socialising, swerving around the families with crying babies they wanted him to hold and ditching his mother’s friends invitations to mow their lawn. Until then, Luke was more than happy to do nothing more than roasting in the sun.

He had nearly dozed off when he was startled by a high-pitched scream, followed by dull laughter. Reluctantly, Luke ripped his earphones out and turned his head to the source of the noise. During the past six months since the Cliffords had moved out of their house to a nicer, more expensive place, the about metre-high hedge between the two properties had grown out. There was a swath in the hedge, though, that Luke wasn’t completely innocent of having helped create. It had been their secret passageway, back when the hedge had just been planted. They had used it so often that eventually the grafts had been trampled and now there was a gap had grown.

From his spot on the blanket, Luke was able to peek through the swath. He would have been able to just scramble to his feet and look over the hedge, but Luke would have rather choked on his own tongue than get caught being interested in what happened in the Cliffords’ garden. Once he had adjusted his sunglasses, Luke had a great view onto the lawn of the other house. There, Michael’s bandmates were running around the garden in their swimming trunks, chasing each other with water guns. Michael himself was nowhere in sight.

Wannabe Bret Michaels captured the brown boy in a headlock and, once he had unscrewed the lid of his water gun, doused the other one until the thick black curls were matted against the brown boy’s forehead.

“Ashton!” the brown boy half-whined, half bellowed, causing Ashton to giggle madly as he released the other boy from his grip in order to run away. “Stop, hey! Get back here, motherfucker!”

“Catch me if you can, Calum!” Ashton yelled back from the other end of the garden.

Luke didn’t know how long he spent watching Michael’s bandmates run around the garden. Something inside him urged Luke on to keep watching, keep studying the other two men. A part of Luke needed to satisfy that curiosity within him, of what kind the people now closest to Michael were. The answer, Luke realised belatedly, after he had watched Ashton and Calum empty an entire keg of beer into a kiddy pool before they wrestled each other into it, was that they were idiots.

The right kind of idiots, though, Luke could tell. Because their roughhousing never got out of hand and that one time Calum crumbled to the ground dramatically after Ashton had hit him in the boob with his water gun, Ashton spent a good ten minutes apologising while helplessly patting Calum’s head and arms. They cared about each other which meant they also cared about Michael and Luke needed them to.

Because Michael would leave eventually, despite of what he had said. Because Michael was Michael Clifford, international pop sensation, now and Luke hated him now. But there had been a time when Michael had been the one that made the planets in Luke’s galaxy orbit and he wouldn’t have wished for Michael to be lonely out there.

It was the unmistakeable sound of the garage door lifting that pulled Luke out of his thoughts and brought him back to reality. Slowly, Luke sat up and made his way to the terrace door. If his mother had come back with a trunk full of groceries, she would expect him to carry some of it inside. Shutting out the splashing and laughter that sounded from across the hedge, Luke pried the terrace door open and slipped inside the house.

He froze halfway across the living room when he heard his mother talk. Frowning, Luke tiptoed to the edge of the walkthrough connecting the living room with the kitchen and peeked around the corner.

His mother was standing next to the kitchen island, unpacking the first bag of groceries. Her gaze was directed towards the kitchen door area that Luke couldn’t see.

“... saying that it would have been a lot harder without you.”

“Of course, Liz,” Michael’s voice answered and then he walked right into Luke’s line of vision, a brimming paper bag in his arms. He set the grocery bag down on the counter before leaning against it with his hip. “You practically raised me and it was no bother at all. I’m just glad it went down as mildly as it did.”

“Yeah,” Luke’s mother answered and Luke could hear the certain kind of gravity in her voice that only appeared whenever his mother was deeply affected. “Me too.”

And Luke saw red. Gritting his teeth, he coughed loudly as he walked into the kitchen, causing both Michael and his mother’s head to turn.

“Luke!” Michael beamed at him upon his entrance and Luke tried hard to not roll his eyes.

“What’s going on?” Luke directed at his mother. He failed to not have it come out as sulky as he felt. Just yesterday his mother had tried to console him about Michael’s return and now she was talking to Michael like she had _before_ , with the same fond tone that was usually reserved for Luke and his brothers.

“Oh,” his mother perked up, “I met Michael at the supermarket and he was so nice as to help me carry everything.”

“No problem, Liz,” Michael chimed up, what Luke identified as his good boy smile plastered on his face. “I’m always glad when I can help.”

Luke wondered in how much trouble he would get if he decked Michael in the face right then and there. But judging by the look on his mother’s face, it would have been a lot.

Without another word, Luke turned away. Before he could give in to the sizzling of his blood, he stalked over to the kitchen door. He could hear Michael follow him, even before Luke had set a foot onto the driveway where the car was standing with the trunk lid open. Luke waited until Michael was next to him, reaching for the crate of water that Luke had wanted to take.

“I must say, I’m impressed.”

Michael hoisted the crate onto the edge of the trunk before he looked up, “Mhm, sorry, what was that, Lukey?”

Luke swallowed down the remark about the nickname and instead focussed on the topic at hand. “It hasn’t been a day and you’ve already managed to wrap my mum back around your finger.”

Michael blinked at him several times, innocently. But then the mask dropped and Michael was grinning at him. There was danger, such well-known danger that had used to excite Luke instead of irritate him, flashing in Michael’s green eyes. Luke’s heartbeat rose.

“Oh, c’mon, Lukey, you know me. Did you really expect me not to make sure I have all the reinforcements I can get?”

Michael leaned over the crate between them and Luke almost took a step back. It was too much, having Michael of that close of a proximity to him, looking at him with those eyes.

“I play dirty, especially when I care about something and there is nothing that I care more about than you. Besides, I missed your parents. Liz told me about the street fest tonight. I can’t wait to see everyone again.”

“You’re not invited,” Luke gritted out through his teeth. He knew he was being ridiculous, but he didn’t care.

Michael shook his head, amusedly, and then handed Luke the crate of water. “I’ll see you tonight, babe.”

Luke was still choking on air by the time Michael had walked over to his own front door and disappeared into the house.

 

 **“And my stomach is sick  
** **And it's all in my head”** **  
** **\- Mr Brightside // The Killers**

 

Michael was stepping from one foot onto the other as he waited for the little pointer of his Pokémon watch to hit the two. After a long day of sitting still in the classroom Michael was practically buzzing with energy and he just wanted for the fun part of his day to start.

The moment the pointer finally reached the two, a loud, familiar bell resonated across the school yard and Michael looked up from his watch and to the school building in front of him. He watched impatiently as a small army of first graders spilled out of the elementary school gates. Michael craned his neck to spot a familiar blond mop of hair to appear among the crowd. A big smile appeared on his face as he found Luke, already making a beeline towards him.

“I have a girlfriend!” Luke announced even before Michael had opened his mouth in greeting.

Michael felt the straps of his backpack slip out of his fingers. “What?”

“I have a girlfriend now,” Luke repeated, excitedly. “Today at lunch Claire came up to me and she asked me if I wanted half her cookie and then she asked me. And now I have a girlfriend!”

Luke beamed at him and Michael hurried to follow his best friend as Luke started walking towards the school’s gates.

“I’m so glad because Caleb got together with Nina yesterday and Paul asked Kaylee last week and now I have a girlfriend, too!”

Michael could feel how his face scrunched up like it had when his dad had tricked him into biting into a lemon that one time. His belly was hurting as well, as if there was lemon juice splashing around in it.

“No,” Michael heard himself say. When he looked up, he was met with Luke’s huge blue eyes widening in confusion. “No, you have to break up with her.”

“What? Why?”

Michael didn’t like the shocked expression on Luke’s face. He didn’t like the way his own heart was thumping in his chest. Michael wasn’t used to this feeling. He had never felt it before and the lemon juice in his belly seemed to get more by the second.

“Because… just because. I don’t like her. And I’m your best friend. You can’t date someone I don’t like. And I don’t like her. That’s it.”

Luke gaped at him, then frowned down to where their feet were hitting the pavement in unison, then he looked back up at Michael. Michael swallowed at the defeated look in Luke’s eyes. Somehow he felt dirty when Luke nodded.

“Okay. I’ll break up with her,” Luke said meekly and Michael took his hand, let it swing between them as they walked together. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Luke shrugged. “If you don’t like her then I don’t want to be with her. Can I wait until tomorrow to break up with her, though? I don’t know her phone number.”

“Yeah,” Michael nodded. “Tomorrow is fine.”

“Good,” Luke smiled at him before the light returned to his eyes. “Do you wanna eat dinner at my house tonight? Dad bought Ben a new football and if I ask him nicely then he will lend it to us.”

“Sounds great, Lukey,” Michael grinned, his heart beating easier when Luke reciprocated the grin. He tapped Michael on the shoulder and yelled “last one home is a chicken” before he took off. Michael felt the last of lemon juice disappear from his belly. Then he ran after Luke.


	4. Chapter 4

**“Have you heard me on the radio  
** **Did you turn it up?”  
** **\- Suburbia // Troye Sivan**

 

There were strings of fairy lights, strung from street lamp to street lamp, casting Luke’s entire street into a soft glow. People were milling around round standing tables, laughing and talking, and the few kids that were still allowed to be up were enjoying the small funfair games that some of the parents had organised. The smell of beer, barbeque and fairy floss was heavy in the air and at the end of the street one of the neighbour kids was DJing on the makeshift stage that some of the family fathers had set up.

Luke flinched when his mother tried to ruffle his hair along with handing him a beer.  
“Mum!” Luke whined, trying to salvage what was left of his quiff.

“Stop complaining, Lewi,” his father reprimanded him. “Your mother brought you into this world so she has the right to mess up your ‘cool guy’ hair as often as she wants.”

“I think it looks good either way,” Will remarked and Luke smiled at him, squeezing the other man’s hand where their fingers were intertwined between them.

“Thank you,” he sniffled. Then he took a step closer. “Please flee from the elderly with me.”

“I heard that!” Luke’s dad yelled after them as Luke pulled Will towards the beverage wagon.

Luke placed his order with one of the girls that were managing it and was rewarded with an award-winning smile before the girl turned away, her cheeks crimson. Luke made sure to wink at her as she handed him the beer he had ordered before handing the other drink to Will.

“I like the fact that we are serving beer in takeaway cups from our coffee shop,” Will said as he took the beer.

“Hey,” Luke jabbed him lightly in the arm. “This event is a group effort and everyone contributed something.”

“Oh, I wasn’t complaining,” Will grinned. “Free promo means more tips for us.”

Luke laughed before he led the way back to his parents, weaved them through the countless groups of neighbours.

He felt his stomach sink as he saw that his parents weren’t alone at their table anymore. It had been a long time, almost half a year since Luke had last seen Michael’s parents. Luke had experienced it in a haze when the moving trucks had arrived and he had watched the Cliffords clear out their house past the branches of the great oak in front of his window. It had hurt, then. Then, there was nothing left.

“Lewi!” his dad waved him closer. “There you are! Look who wants to say hello to you!”

“Hey, guys!” Luke pressed a smile onto his face as he was enveloped by Michael’s mother.

“You look good, Luke.” Karen smiled at him as he pulled away and Luke felt himself reciprocate the gesture. He had no ill feelings towards Michael’s parents. It wasn’t their fault. Luke just caught the glint of something in Karen’s eyes before he turned towards Michael’s father.

“Hey, kiddo!” Daryl grinned at him before slapping him on the back. “Your father just told me about your university aspirations. I’m proud of you.”

“Yeah,” Luke rubbed the back of his head. Momentarily, his attention got caught by Michael’s black and white face, smiling up at him from where it was printed onto the front of Daryl’s shirt, along with the rest of Michael’s band. It coaxed an honest smile out of Luke. He felt himself relax. Being proud of his son made up at least seventy percent of Daryl’s persona, Luke knew. “I’ve been looking into applying for a Science degree. Not sure what exactly what I wanna do yet, though, it’s all very-”

“Here, Mum.”

Luke abruptly lost his train of thought as he watched Michael appear next to his mother, handing her a bottle of water.

“Oh, hey, honey! Don't you wanna say hi to Luke’s parents?”

“Oh, Liz and I met at the grocery store already, haven’t we?” Michael grinned at Luke’s mother and Luke could see Will move out of the corner of his eye. A short glance at his boyfriend told Luke that Will was watching the exchange in front of them with furrowed brows. The confusion in Will’s eyes was replaced with wonder and then disdain when Luke’s father greeted Michael with a clap on the back and a too fond for Luke’s liking “Good to see you back in town, Mike.”

Will turned to look at him and Luke quickly averted his gaze.

“So you’re Michael.”

Will’s words made everyone look up. Will’s tone had been polite, but clinical and _loud._ Luke watched Michael’s face distort into a smile that was so familiar to Luke he nearly laughed as Michael met the other man’s eyes.

“That’s me.” Michael smiled at Will like Luke had watched Michael smile at teachers during his last months of high school. “And you are?”

“I’m Will, Will Compton. I’m Luke’s boyfriend.”

“Nice to meet you, Will,” Michael mused and extended his hand over the round table between them. After a moment of hesitation, Will took it. Michael’s smile grew so wide Luke thought it might split Michael’s face in half. Then Michael turned back towards his mother and placed a quick kiss on her cheek. “I have to excuse myself, I fear. Mrs Robinson from the Garden and Fences Club asked me to play tonight, so I have to go. I think the others are already waiting for me. Have a good rest of the fest, guys. Have a good evening, Luke.”

Michael tilted his head to smile at Luke, sincerely with that hint of danger back in his eyes and then he was squeezing himself through the crowd in the direction of the stage where Luke could see his bandmates already busy setting up. Luke watched Michael climb up the stage, shake hands with the DJ before he began talking to Ashton.

“You wanna get some fairy floss?”

Luke turned sharply to find Will smiling at him.

“Sure! Yes! Excellent idea!” Luke took his boyfriend’s hand and made a beeline for the small booth further up the street. There was a small queue in front of it, so they joined the line. Luke hummed as Will began to play with his fingers. He smiled as he met the other man’s eyes.

Luke was just leaning in when they were interrupted by the shrill sound of acoustic feedback. Involuntarily, his head whipped towards the familiar sound. Michael was standing with his guitar in his arms, the bleached fringe falling into his eyes as he ran his fingers over the strings once. Calum to his right, now holding a sleek, black bass guitar, mirrored the action while Ashton behind them sat down on his cajon. Michael’s head shot up and with unerring certainty his gaze landed on Luke.

“This one,” Michael’s lips touched the microphone as he spoke and Luke ran his tongue over his own, “is a favourite song of my mum’s. It’s called Iris by Goo Goo Dolls so this one’s for her. Love you, Mum!”

For the entire first verse, Luke could do nothing but stare at Michael’s hands, stare at the way they flew over the fret of the guitar. Luke had watched Michael work his way to that proficiency and he could still remember it, the way Michael’s fingers had been clumsy at first, how Michael had complained that real guitar was so much harder than Guitar Hero and the slow progress he had made. Now Michael was a god at the guitar. Long gone were the days when he had to stare at his hands while playing. Now Michael stared at Luke as he played, his voice ringing through Luke’s head and drowning out everything else.

“Luke!”

Luke snapped out of it when he was shaken by the shoulder.

“What?” Luke blinked at Will.

“Are you okay?” Will furrowed his brows. “I said your name like twice.”

“Yes, sorry.” Luke smiled brightly at him. “I am great.”  
And with that, Luke grabbed his boyfriend by the lapels and pulled Will against him, slotted their mouths together. Luke swallowed the surprised noise Will uttered and made sure to hold on for another couple of seconds before he let go. Will’s eyes were comically wide when Luke let go of him, his jaw slack.

Luke got why Will may have been a little confused. They normally didn’t engage in any public displays of affection... or private ones, for that matter. They were taking it slow and had barely done much more than holding hands.

“Uh…we’re up,” Luke mumbled.

“Yeah,” Will nodded, a slightly dazed expression in his eyes as he turned towards the lady behind the fairy floss booth and bought a bucket of pink fairy floss for them to share. While Will paid, Luke let his eyes wander over the people around them and the back to the stage.

Luke knew he had made a mistake the moment he met Michael’s eyes. The expression in Michael’s eyes was indecipherable, and so intense that Luke felt the ground beneath him vanish. He couldn’t look away. He couldn’t even breathe. The last chord of the song sounded loudly through the speakers and then the people around them were clapping. Michael jumped off the stage with a huge grin before he went to hug his mother.Luke could see their neighbours talk about him, all of them wearing the same, infatuated expression that made Luke sick to the stomach. Before he knew it, he was moving.  Luke made a beeline straight for where Michael was laughing about something an elderly lady that Luke identified as Mrs Robinson had said to him.

“Hey, Luke! There you are. Did you enjoy the show?”

Ignoring Michael’s words, Luke grabbed him by the upper arm and dragged Michael along with him, away from the stage and to the side of it, out of view from the rest of the people.

“Woah, Luke, what the-”

“You need to go.”

“What?”

Luke let go of Michael in order to cross his arms in front of his chest. “You need to go.”

Michael stared at him, lightly shaking his head before he mirrored Luke’s action and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “The street fest is for everyone, Luke.”

“I know. But I’m asking you. Please, go home.” Luke raised one hand to rub it over his face. “I… I can’t have you here, okay? You need to go.”

Michael furrowed his brows, but then his expression changed and suddenly he was grinning. The pleased expression on his face made Luke’s heart seize.

“Okay,” Michael nodded. “Okay, I’ll go if that’s what you want. But I want something in return.”

Before he could rein it in, an audible groan had left Luke’s lips. “Of course you do.”

Michael shrugged and Luke rolled his eyes.

“Fine, what do you want?”

“Dinner,” Michael replied within a heartbeat. “Have dinner with me. Tomorrow. Then I’ll leave.”

“No way.” Luke shook his head vehemently. “I’m not going on a date with you, Michael.”

Michael shifted his weight and Luke could see the inaudible sigh leave Michael’s lips. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, Luke. It’s not a date. It’s going to be dinner at my place and Ashton and Calum will be there as well. I want you to meet them, is all.”

Luke looked at the ground, worried his lip between his teeth.

“C’mon, Lukey, it’s just dinner.”

It was when Luke tasted a hint of iron on his tongue that he let go of his bottom lip and instead looked back up at Michael.

“Fine,” he sighed. “Fine, I’ll come over tomorrow.”

Michael’s face lit up, “Awesome. I’ll tell everyone that I’m off for the night and then I’m gone.”

Luke nodded. “Good.” With that, he turned around and made his way back to the street.

“Oh and Luke?”

Michael smiled brightly at him when Luke turned back to him. And Luke knew what was coming even before Michael had opened his mouth, the flash of danger in Michael’s eyes warning enough.

“I know you weren’t fully enjoying kissing him. You always play with their hair when you do, and your hands didn’t even twitch.”

Luke snapped his mouth shut before his jaw hit the floor. Clenching his fists by his sides, Luke turned around and walked away. His heart was still pounding in his chest by the time he had made it back to his parents’ table. Will was waiting there for him, the bucket of fairy floss dangling from his fingers.

“Luke! Where’d you go? I turned around and suddenly you were gone.”

“I’m sorry.” He greeted Will with a quick peck on the lips and savoured the pleasant feeling in his stomach it left him with. Michael didn’t know anything. “I had to sort out something.”

“Oh,” Will’s expression changed from bemusement to one of concern. “Is everything alright?”

“Yeah,” Luke waved him off, “no worries.”

“Okay, then.” A timid smile spread over Will’s face and Luke took the bucket out of his hands. Luke found great joy in pulling tufts of fairy floss from the mass and feeding it to Will. That was, until he was bumped into from behind and the bucket slipped from his fingers, bouncing a couple of times on the asphalt before it landed in the gutter. Luke looked up from where the bucket had landed to find one of the neighbour kids smiling at him sheepishly.

“Oops, sorry, Luke.”

Luke swallowed down his disappointment about the lost food and waved the eight year-old off instead.“It’s fine, Hunter. Just look where you’re going next time, alright?”

“Okay! Thanks, Luke! See you later!”

Luke watched as Hunter took off before he turned to Will. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” Will took his hand. “It’s just food. Do you wanna dance with me?” Will tilted his head into the direction of the stage where the DJ was playing some chart bop. Several people were dancing already, including - much to Luke’s embarrassment - his parents.

“You’re asking me to dance?” Luke batted his eyelashes, rested a hand on his chest before he broke into a grin. He followed Will onto the makeshift dance floor. Luke couldn’t help but hum along to the tune of the song as Will pulled him closer. They dabbled with foxtrot for some time before eventually the DJ switched to more mellow music and Luke hooked his chin over Will’s shoulder. He closed his eyes as they swayed on their feet and this way, Luke was unprepared when suddenly, he was leaning on air, falling until Will caught him, pulled him close against his chest.

“What the-”

Startled, Luke searched the area behind him to find deep brown eyes locking with his for a moment before Calum and Michael’s other bandmate quite _literally_ waltzed on. With their arms held in classical pose, Ashton and Calum danced through the crowd, despite the slow tune of the song that was blaring from the speakers. Luke saw that he wasn’t the only one that had fallen victim to their long strides. Left and right people were tripping out of their way. Once they caught on to Calum and Ashton’s dancing, they laughed about it though.

“Are you okay?” Will asked. “Sorry, I just moved when I saw them approaching.”

“Yeah,” Luke lifted himself into an upright position and placed his hand on the hand Will had placed on his shoulder in an attempt to steady him. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m uhm… I’m tired, though. Do you mind if I walk you to your car?”

“Oh,” Will’s eyebrows rose. “Yeah, of course. Are you sure you are fine?”

“Yes,” Luke smiled, “I’m really just tired. And I’ve got the morning shift tomorrow so it’s probably better if I go to bed early.”

Will nodded before he led the way off the makeshift dance floor and past the stage to where car after car had been parked on the official car park for the night.

“Sleep well, Luke,” Will told him as soon as they had arrived at his car. Carefully, Will lifted his hand and stroked the remnants of Luke’s quiff out of his eyes.

Luke smiled at the gesture, pressed a swift kiss onto Will’s lips. “You too.”

He closed the car door behind his boyfriend once Will had sat himself down on the driver’s seat. Luke waited until Will had driven off before he headed for his house. It lay in complete darkness, all the lights shut off as Luke’s parents were still at the festival. Luke couldn’t help but let his gaze wander upwards while he searched his back pockets for his keys. Despite the fact that it hadn’t rained all day, the sky hung full of clouds, grey tufts against the black sky. Luke figured that it would probably rain during the night, maybe they would even have to deal with a thunderstorm. He would have to remember to close his window.

 

**“You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be  
** **And I don't want to go home right now”  
** **\- Iris // Goo Goo Dolls**

 

Luke was lying with his face smushed against the pillow of his bed, his hand held uncomfortable in the air as to keep the flap of the book he was reading from falling onto his face. He had gotten the book from his mother as a present for his seventh birthday and every night since then, Luke had spent getting lost in the world it mapped out for him.

It was a loud bang against his window that made Luke sit upright in bed, the book onto the floor as he struggled out of bed. Despite the rain that was pelting heavily against his window, Luke pushed the pane up, squinted outside.

“Michael! What the hell are you doing out there?”

“Step aside, Lukey!”

“You’re crazy!” Luke’s eyes widened as he watched his best friend rise from where he had been sitting on one of the thicker branches of the tree between their windows. Luke felt nauseous as he watched Michael balance on the branch as far as he could before his hands reached the sill of Luke’s window and then Michael was hoisting himself through. Luke hurried to grab onto Michael’s shoulders and pull him in the rest of the way. “What are you doing in the tree like that?!”

“Please, Lukey.” Michael shrugged him off as he pulled himself to his feet. “You have watched me do this at least a bazillion times.”

Luke frowned. “Yeah, but not during a thunderstorm. My mum said you have to get as low as possible when there’s lightning because the lightning only strikes things that are high in the air.”

“Liz is a smart mum.” Michael conceded. “Still, I’m not afraid of lightning. The chance to get struck is like one to a million and that’s really, really small. Also I made it, didn’t I?”

Luke couldn’t really argue with that point, or Michael’s grin so he decided to let it slide and returned to his bed, crossing his legs under him as he sat down on the duvet.

“Why’d you come over?”

“Ah,” Michael raised his index finger. “Now you’re asking the right questions. Look what I brought.”

With a triumphant green, Michael pulled a CD case from the kanguru bag of his sweatshirt. On the white, blue and pink cover, there was a smiley with crossed out eyes, surrounded by a circle of arrows.

“My dad bought it for me after work. Isn’t it cool?”

Wide-eyed, Luke stretched out his hand. “Let me see.”

Michael nodded, handed the case to Luke. Luke traced the smiley with his finger before he turned to the title printed onto the top.

“Blink one hundred and eighty two?” Luke asked Michael.

The older boy huffed, shaking his head. “No, doofus. They are pronounced _blink one eighty-two._ ”

“Ah,” Luke nodded and turned back to inspecting the casing. As soon as he had surveyed every centimetre, had struggled his way through the song names printed onto the back, he scrambled back of the back and to his desktop. Next to his desk lamp sat his CD player. Luke popped the lid open, carefully inserted the CD into the reader before pressing the lid back shut. The CD player gave a row of clacking noises before the small display started to blink.

“Skip to the third song. That one’s my fave.” Michael told him from where he had sprawled himself out on Luke’s bed.

Luke obliged, his steps matching the drums that started up a second later as he skipped back to the bed. Michael let out a loud _oof_ when Luke let himself flop down onto the other boy, but didn’t protest any further. Luke wriggled around until he was comfortable and then placed Michael’s hand on his head. After a couple of moments, Michael began to pat his head, causing Luke to hum in contentment. With his face mushed into Michael’s chest, he could hear Michael’s heart beat against his ear, matching the tune of the song.

“I like the deep guitar.”

“That’s the bass line. Dad says it’s like the foundation of the song.”

“It’s a good foundation.”

“Mhm. One day, I’ll learn to make a song like that. And then I’ll play it to everyone and become as famous as blink.”

“ _Blink one eighty-two_ ,” Luke lilted.

He found Michael smiling at him when he looked up. “Yeah.”

Luke smiled, poking out his tongue like the smiley on the CD case before a thought made his face fall. “But, Michael, you can’t forget about me when you’re famous.”

“Of course not, Lukey,” Michael shook his head vehemently. “You’re my best friend. Just wait, I’ll buy a jet and then I’ll fly you everywhere that I am.”

“Good,” Luke said, consoled and dumped his head back onto Michael’s chest. As the song faded out, leaving nothing but the deep guitar, Luke closed his eyes and let himself be lulled in by the music and Michael’s hand in his hair.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Disclaimer:_ This prenote is addressing the people that have ventured into my askbox on tumblr and into the comments on here, voicing their concerns about how they think Michael is abusive in this fic and emotionally manipulative and all the other labels you can think of to label someone as "problematic." This is me acknowledging the topic, for once and all. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, 1) you're good, you're gucci, donut worry and 2) yes, absolutely can you just skip to the chapter already. For those I did just address: 
> 
> First off, yes, you are right. Michael is problematic. Is he abusive and manipulative? I could now write page after page, analysing every scene he has appeared in so far and explaining in detail why he isn't, but that's an effort I am simply not willing to make in this situation and it would contain spoilers that I refuse to give. Regarding any interpretations of Michael's behaviour in the aforementioned directions, I will just point you towards two facts: 1) Michael and Luke were together for fourteen years before this story sets in. 2) Luke is not a baby.
> 
> But yes, Michael isn't unproblematic. Neither is Luke. In writing, I toe the line of emotional abuse, I do. My stories are violent, all of them, in a vast array of different ways because humans are violent. We all abuse each other, constantly. We do not mean to but we mistreat each other on accident and we are selfish and we get angry and we say hurtful things. Humans aren't unproblematic, and neither will my characters ever be. Especially if they are in love. Love means peace and the outmost war. I write my story with the goal of being as realistic as possible, and if I want to write realistically I cannot give you peace but forego the war. 
> 
> Having said all this, I advise you to exit out of this fic and not look back if you truly hate it that much. Do not read the rest of this fic. You will surely not like what’s coming if you disliked what has happened so far. I don't get paid so you're not obligated to read because you spent money on this story. You can just press the back button. Truthfully, I would prefer you to as this is not written for you. 
> 
> To all the others: Like always, enjoy!

**“If you only knew how hard it is to handle  
** **How bad I want this scandal”  
** **\- The Next Room // Neon Animals**

 

Luke ran his hand through his quiff one last time before he rasped his knuckles over the varnished wood in front of him. Not a second later, he could hear voices from behind the door, followed by the thundering of footsteps and then the front door was ripped open.

“Luke,” Michael greeted him, happily.

Luke was about to give a “hey” back when his jaw dropped. Michael noticed his gaze and lifted his hand to his hair, ruffled the dyed strands with a sheepish grin. “I did it this morning. Do you like it? Ashton told me to go for the whole head but I thought it looked kinda cool when it’s only partially done and-”

“You look like a smurf was slaughtered on your head,” Luke remarked. Then he shouldered his way past Michael into his house. Luke could hear Michael sigh behind him as he closed the door after Luke.

The interior of Michael’s house, Luke realised, was still almost completely furnished. Only the pictures on the walls were gone, and the little knick knacks that Michael’s mother had held dear. It made sense. The new house Michael had bought for them had probably already been endowed with much nicer, more expensive furniture anyways.

Luke followed the low music that trickled into the hallway into the dinner room where the table had been set up more nicely than Luke had it ever seen in the fourteen years he had called this house his second home.

Bowed over the table, Ashton was placing a napkin that had been folded into the shape of a swan on one of the plates. He perked up as soon as he he had noticed Luke standing in the door.

“Hi!” Ashton dropped the three remaining napkin swans propped under his arm onto the chair next to him so he could skip over and offer Luke his hand. “What’s up, man? I’m Ashton.”

“Luke,” Luke managed. He felt a little bit overwhelmed at the way Ashton was looking at him, as if Luke was the most important, breath-taking person Ashton had ever met. Luke was glad to find that Ashton apparently looked at everyone he talked to that way when the last remaining member of Michael’s band entered from the kitchen. “Calum, come say hi! This is Luke.”

“Oh, trust me, Ash, I know.” Calum smiled at Ashton as he walked over, a lot more elegant and a lot less zealous to greet Luke than his friend. Calum’s offered Luke a polite smile along with his hand.

“I am Calum. Nice to meet you.”

Luke shook Calum’s hand, tipping his head in greeting. Calum nodded infinitesimally before turning around and disappearing back into the kitchen. Ashton beamed at Luke and then turned back to his napkin swans.

“Come, Lukey, you can help me get some water from the porch.”

In lack of something better to do, Luke followed Michael out of the dinner room and through the living area out into the garden. Luke traced his fingers of the familiar wallpaper as he left the room, pressed his fingertips against the wooden door frame of the terrace door. The evening’s air was warm, damp against Luke’s face.

“They seem nice,” Luke commented as he took the two bottles of water Michael pulled from the crate stores next to the terrace door. Out of reflex, Luke pressed one of them against his neck, sighed at the pleasant cold against his skin. Luke frowned when he found Michael watching him as he looked up, a disgustingly fond expression on Michael’s face.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Michael shook his head, “that was just… very you. The cool drink thing. I missed that.”

“It’s hot outside.”

Michael’s grin only widened. He shrugged and picked up two bottles on his own before he lead the way back inside.

“Oi, perfect timing!” Ashton greeted them, now clad in a cooking apron, a huge casserole dish in his mitten-clad hands. “Dinner’s ready.”

“We sent Ash to our local organic market and he went on a bit of a splurge,” Michael explained to Luke while they took a seat around the dinner table. “This is why this is all looks as if it was just pulled from the earth.”

“It smells fantastic, though,” Calum directed at Ashton as soon as the other man had taken the seat next to him.

Ashton beamed at Calum before pointing to the dish in the middle of the table. “This is salmon prepared after a recipe that I found in one of Michael’s mum’s cookbooks. Then we’ve got sweet potato mash, asparagus, uh sauces and rice if you don’t like mash, I wasn’t sure what you like exactly…” Ashton smiled at Luke apologetically and Luke hurried to wave him off. “And that’s pretty much it, alright guys, dig in.”

While Calum and Ashton began to shovel food onto their plates, Luke watched Michael stand up from his seat and pull out his smartphone. Luke made sure to lean out of the frame as Michael snapped a picture of the table.

“Are you posting that to the band account?” Calum asked.

Michael nodded, tapping away on his phone while he sat back down. “Yeah, we haven’t posted anything in two days.”

“You guys have a schedule for your social media?” Luke asked incredulously.

Michael smiled at him. “We’re MIA to the rest of the world right now, so we have to post things to keep everyone entertained while we’re gone.”

“We’d like to ask you not to post anything on social media about our location as well.” Calum raised his hands upon Luke’s frown. “Not that you would. Just… better safe than sorry, you know? If our locations leaks it might get ugly really quickly. No offense to you, of course, but your town doesn’t really seem to be equipped to deal with a onrush of paps.”

“Or fangirls,” Ashton added.

“Or that.”

Luke swallowed. “That sounds crazy.”

“They aren’t crazy.”

Luke was surprised at the harsh tone to Michael’s voice. Ever since he had come back, Michael had talked to him either full of zeal, or in that dangerous kind of way that made Luke have to take a step back because it opened up an abyss that Luke wasn’t ready to fall down. Not once, not even before as far as Luke could remember, had Michael talked to him as if he was… offended.

Michael seemed to realise his mistake as in the next moment, his features softened. “They are passionate,” Michael said. “Our fans are passionate.”

Luke nodded. Slowly, he felt the knot in his stomach untangle. In the last second, he refrained from taking Michael’s hand in silent apology. That was an old habit.

“Some of our fans are high class stalkers,” Calum said. “Really, if you look into it it’s actually impressive, right, Ash? Hey, tell Luke about that one time a fan hid in your bunk on the tour bus.”

“Oh my god, I remember that. Okay, so it was like this..:”

Luke turned to Ashton as the other boy dove into his story, so he missed the look Michael and Calum exchanged. Luke found that it was easy, being with Michael and his bandmates. Ashton was so talkative that Luke barely had to make an effort to contribute to the conversation and Calum, albeit being a little cooler towards Luke, was nice enough for Luke to be comfortable. He felt comfortable.

After dinner they moved outside onto the round stone patio at the back of the Cliffords’ garden. Luke made himself comfortable on one of the lawn chairs arranged in a circle around the fire place while he watched Calum and Michael struggled to set the fire basket in the middle of the patio ablaze. Luke looked up when Ashton appeared in front of him.

“Is VB cool with you?” Ashton asked him, two bottles of the beer in hand. “It was kinda the only thing in the fridge over there.”

“Yeah, sure,” Luke gave back, remembering only belatedly that he hated Victoria Bitter. Keeping silent as to not make Ashton feel bad, Luke placed his bottle between his thighs while Ashton sprawled himself out on the lawn chair next to him.

With a shout, Calum and Michael jumped back from the fire basket as a metre high spiral of fire shot up into the sky.

“You idiot, I told you not to douse it in accelerant. I could’ve burned my face off.”

“Nothing we wouldn’t have seen before, babe.” Calum patted Michael on the shoulder unsympathetically.

Calum placed the seemingly empty plastic bottle in his hand underneath the lawn chair next to Ashton’s and dropped himself down onto it. Michael rolled his eyes, grumbling something unintelligible before he turned around and disappeared back into the house.

Luke watched Ashton and Calum wrangle for a little bit over who dared to push his chair closer to the fire until Michael came back. He handed Calum one of the two bottles in his hand before he let himself fall onto the free chair next to Luke. Luke looked down to where the bottle of Veronica Bitter was slowly but surely causing frostbite on his inner thighs. That was, until the bottle was taken from him and replaced with an opened Corona, a slice of lemon wedged into the opening.

Luke looked up to find Michael’s gaze trained on Calum and Ashton.

“Thank you.”

Michael turned to look at him and winked, his smile so warm that it made the corners of Luke’s mouth tilt upwards. Luke smothered his laugh with the back of his hand when Michael took a swig of his own bottle and his face scrunched up in disgust at the cat piss taste of the beer. Before he could get caught, Luke tuned into the conversation Calum and Ashton were having, taking a swig of his own beer. He savoured the cool, fizzy sensation of the Corona against the heat of the fire.

The evening faded into the night and soon, Luke found himself relaxing back into his lawn chair, basking in the presence of the people around him. At some point, Ashton retrieved an acoustic guitar from the house and Luke watched as one of the most famous bands in the world played an array of old Bon Jovi songs in the backyard of his neighbour’s house. It made a part of Luke feel nauseous, the knowledge that his neighbour was one of them. That Michael was one of them. But then Luke had known that. He had always known Michael would make it.

Even though Luke was an amateur at music - his knowledge consisting entirely of the bits and pieces he had picked up from Michael over the years - he could tell that Calum, Ashton and Michael were fantastic together. They harmonised blindly together. It reminded Luke of the countless night he had spent in the basement of one of Michael’s friends, watching them jam. But Luke hadn’t paid much attention to the music then.

It was a loud beeping noise that shook Luke out of his thoughts. For several, confused moments, Luke looked around for the source of the noise until suddenly, Calum was screeching, bolting up from his lawn chair and running around the fire with his phone in front of his hands.

“Oh my fucking god, I knew it! I KNEW IT! I knew it would find something!”

Disbelievingly, Luke watched Calum zig zag across the garden, changing his direction whenever the beeping of his phone became more or less incessant.

“Uhm,” Luke managed before Ashton was jumping up as well, chasing after Calum who was now headed for the back fence separating the garden from the willow behind their houses.

“Calum! Come back here, you idiot! Ghosts don’t even exist! Unbelievable- Calum!” Ashton yelled and, with a bellowed groan, hoisted himself over the fence after Calum had taken a great, big leap right into the willow.

Luke looked after them for a couple of perplexed moments before he turned to Michael, who had watched the whole ordeal with amusement written all over his face. He shrugged when he noticed Luke’s questioning gaze.

“Calum has a slight obsession with the paranormal,” Michael explained, grinningly. “Don’t worry, they should be back in like half an hour tops.”

Luke felt his heart skip a beat. He was alone with Michael now.

“Uh,” Luke clutched the empty bottle in his hand and held it up. “I’m going to get more beer. You want one too?”

Luke pretended he didn’t see the unmistakable flash of disappointment in Michael’s eyes before Michael smiled at him and nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

Luke reciprocated the nod and got up, made sure to cross by Calum and Ashton’s chairs instead of Michael’s on his way around the fire.

“Bottom shelf of the fridge in the kitchen,” Michael called after him.

“I know!” Luke gave back before he could bite his tongue.

Once Luke had made it into Michael’s kitchen, he ripped the door of the fridge open and stuck his head in. Greedily, Luke sucked on the cold air. He hoped it would cool down the blood rushing through his head. As soon as Luke got the feeling his forehead was about to freeze, his picked up two bottles from the bottom and threw the door of the fridge back shut.

Ashton and Calum were still gone when Luke returned, but he was pretty sure he could hear their voices, far off in the willow behind the garden. Michael was looking down where he hadn’t moved from his chair, his eyes focussed on the strings of his guitar. He was plucking a couple of them, mumbling words too low for Luke to hear and Luke faltered in his steps, came to a halt.

For the first time, Luke allowed himself to look at Michael, really look at him. Luke took in the way the flames let shadows dance over Michael’s features, a lot more defined now and less boyish than they were in the image of Michael Luke carried in his mind.

He dragged his eyes from Michael’s hair, the mix of blond with blue on top that made Michael look like a fun dip stick, over the even bridge of Michael’s nose down to his mouth, surrounded by a dust of stubble that hadn’t been there yet when Michael had walked into the coffee shop what felt like an eternity ago.

Before Luke could think too much about how accustomed he was to Michael’s presence again already, he let his gaze wander further down Michael’s neck and wash over Michael’s collar bones, exposed by the undone upper buttons of Michael’s flannel.

Luke wasn’t sure whether it was the low buzz of the alcohol in his blood, leaving the edges of his mind fuzzy, but watching the flames dance over Michael’s face made Luke yearn for another time, another life when Michael’s eyes had ignited his bones and his mouth had held Luke’s secrets and Michael’s hands had played his skin and not strings. It made Luke yearn for Michael.

Luke didn’t realise he was crying until he felt the first, heavy tear drop fall onto his bottom lip, leaving the taste of salt. It was an unfamiliar taste to Luke now. He couldn’t recall a time that he had cried since since the realisation that his life had split into a before and an after had broken his neck, leaving Luke paralysed for weeks until he had pushed the brakes. It had gotten too much then, feeling the way he had and watching his family suffer even more because of him, even though they had already been burdened with worry then. Luke let out a loud sob.

The sound made Michael’s head whip up, his eyes widening as he spotted Luke standing in the middle of the lawn, the beer bottles long having slipped from his fingers. The alarm in Michael’s eyes was replaced by concern and then he was scrambling to his feet, resting the guitar on the ground in his haste to stand up.

“Shit, Luke, what’s wrong?”

Unable to speak, Luke reached out a hand. There was no oxygen in his lungs. His chest was caving in. In an instant, Michael had bridged the distance between them, wrapped his arms around Luke.

“Fuck, Luke.”

“Michael,” Luke managed. His gaze was clouded, more and more tears spilling out of his eyes. It felt like a dam breaking. It was as if his anger had prohibited the puzzle pieces from falling into place, the realisation from kicking in. All Luke saw and smelled and felt was Michael, there, right with him, surrounding him. Michael had been everywhere… and now he was here with Luke. Michael was back.

“Shh, it’s okay.” Luke could hear the panic in Michael’s voice. “It’s okay, Lukey. It’s okay.”

Luke could feel Michael’s hands in his hair. He focussed on the pressure of Michael’s arm slung around his waist. He wrapped his arms around Michael’s neck, so tightly he feared he was going to suffocate Michael, but the other man only held him tighter.

“Michael,” Luke wrenched out, sobbed past the tears clouding his gaze and he couldn’t let go. He couldn’t ever let go again. “You’re here.”

“I’m here.” Michael laughed and the sound came out like an aborted hiccup because Michael was crying, too, Luke realised. Michael knew. Of course, he knew. “I’m sorry, Luke. I’m so sorry. I let you down even though I promised I wouldn’t and I’m am so sorry. But I’m here now, Lukey. I came back. I came back for you. I’m here to make it right. Please, stop crying, baby.”

“Michael.” Luke buried his face in the exposed skin of Michael’s shoulder, breathed in the familiar smile of the Cliffords’ laundry detergent and Michael.

“Please, tell me what you need, Luke. Please tell me how I can help you. I don’t know how I can help you. What do you need?”

Against all his instincts, Luke pulled away from Michael in order to look him into the eyes. Slowly, he lifted his hand from Michael’s neck and rested it on his cheek instead.

“Michael,” Luke whispered.

It took a couple of seconds, seconds during which Luke fought his heart would burst with how hard it was hammering against his rib cage, until the realisation unfolded in Michael’s eyes that Luke had answered his question.

Luke pressed his lips against Michael’s, then. Michael reacted in an instant and let his mouth fall open as he pulled Luke against him by his waist. Michael kissed him back, so hard that it left Luke dizzy with the need for more. It was Michael who broke for air, eventually.

Luke expected to find smug satisfaction in Michael’s eyes as he slowly opened his eyes. But there was no victory in Michael’s eyes. There was only love, such fierce love that Luke remembered Michael’s words, all the times Michael had told him how much Luke meant to him. Luke had known that Michael had meant every single word of them because that was how the world worked. Michael loved Luke. And Michael had been right. Luke loved him, too. Heaving as much air into his lungs as he could, Luke slotted their mouths back together. All Luke had ever done was loving Michael.

 

 **“You’ve been on my mind since the flood** **  
** **Heaven help a fool who falls in love.”  
** **\- Ophelia // The Lumineers**

 

“Hey, no fair! Michael!” Luke pouted as he watched the bar above his digimon shrink into the reds before it vanished completely. On screen, his digimon did a couple dance moves before it fell off the screen. The controller in Luke’s hands vibrated and Luke threw it onto the duvet next to him. It was a very childish move for an eleven year-old, but Luke didn’t care. This was the third time in a row he had lost to Michael playing Digimon Rumble Arena.

Michael next to him let out a victorious scream before jabbing Luke in the ribs, lightly. “I won!”

“You cheated.” Luke crossed his arms in front of his chest.

Michael’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head in offense. “Did not!”

“Yes, you did!”

“Did not!”

Luke huffed before jabbing a finger into Michael’s chest, right into the eye of the dragon printed onto the front of it. “You’re a cheater.”

Michael’s mouth snapped shut, his eyes narrowing on the finger Luke held pressed against his chest and it was then that Luke realised he had made a mistake. He had barely managed to scramble off the bed before he was tackled to the ground.

“Who are you calling a cheater?” Michael yelled into his ear.

With Michael’s arms locked around his middle and his face smushed into the plush carpet flooring of Michael’s room, Luke squirmed in an attempt to free himself. “No, Michael, please! Mercy, mercy!”

Luke knew that his begging was futile when Michael rolled them around so Luke was caged on top of him. Before Michael could push him off in order to attack for real, Luke used all the strength in his leg to kick out. Michael let out a wince and his grip around Luke’s waist loosened.

Luke used the opportunity and struggled free. He fled towards the door, his hand slipping from the handle when Michael crashed into him from behind, slinging his arms around Luke before throwing him onto the bed. In that moment, Luke hated every of the three inches Michael had gained on him during his latest growth spurt.  

Before Luke could so much as reach back to swing against Michael, Michael had planted himself on Luke’s stomach. Horror spread through Luke’s body as he realised what Michael was planning to do.

“No, Michael, don’t tickle me, please, no! Mercy!”

Keeping Luke’s hands suspended above his head with one arm Michael used the other to let his fingers dance across Luke’s exposed belly where Luke’s shirt had rode up during their wrestling. Luke squeezed his eyes shut at the assault and laughed until his belly was hurting with the force of it. It wasn’t until Luke’s breath had run out and he was visibly gasping that Michael let off him.

“You’re so… mean,” Luke whined out while he slowly opened his eyes. To his surprise, he found that Michael was breathing almost as heavily as he was. And Luke hadn’t even gotten a chance to tickle him back.

“Michael?”

A tiny crease appeared between Michael’s brows, but the other boy didn’t drag his gaze up to meet Luke’s eyes. Michael’s eyes were fixed on a point on Luke’s face that was lower than Luke’s eyes. A weird, prickling warmth spread in Luke’s tummy as he realised what Michael was staring at. Luke had seen the expression in Michael’s eyes before, in the movies his mother loved to watch and that Luke pretended to hate because Jack and Ben always made gagging motions when the people starring in it kissed at the end. When they kissed.

Luke had thought about kissing Michael before, when he had thought about kissing in general and who he could do that with. Luke had wondered if Michael would mind trying it out, just to know what it felt like. Now, with Michael staring at his lips, Luke burned with the need to know.

“Michael,” Luke breathed out, “look at me.”

Luke’s words seemed to shake Michael out of his trance. He blinked and finally met Luke’s gaze. Luke smiled, almost timidly now that he could feel how loaded the air between them was.

“Do what you have to do, Michael.”

Michael’s breath stopped short, his eyes widening infinitesimally but then he was leaning down and Luke had trouble banning the grin from his face. Michael’s lips were rough, but warm against Luke’s and Luke wondered whether the people in the movies felt the same tingles in their bellies when they kissed as he did right now.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive me for my wrongs, I have just begun.

  **“I’ve crossed every line and broke every boundary** **  
****The church that I went to, it ain’t that holy”** **  
****\- Judgement Day // Stealth**

“Luke.”

Reluctantly, Luke opened his eyes, forced himself to look at Michael. Michael’s voice was raspy as he spoke and Luke couldn’t look away from his lips, but there was a question in Michael’s eyes that demanded answering. After a moment of consideration, Luke turned his head towards the willow, raising an eyebrow at Michael.

“Don’t worry about them.” Michael took his hand. “C’mon”

Luke couldn’t help the silent breath of relief as he let Michael pull him towards the house. Luke held tightly onto Michael as they crossed the living room, stumbled up the stairs and into Michael’s room. Once the door had fallen shut behind them and Michael had locked it, Michael was pushing Luke up against the door like he had done when they had been sixteen and lost the ability to keep their hands off each other for more than an hour at a time. Eight hours of school had been hell then, but Luke felt no need to complain. He hadn’t experienced school the way Michael did.

Pushing any and all high school memories aside, Luke tightened his grip around Michael’s neck and savoured the taste of Michael’s lips back on his. It was still the most addictive taste Luke knew.

Michael’s hand fell from his neck, squeezed his arm before he let it slip beneath Luke’s shirt. Luke felt his stomach muscles clench in the most delicious way, his cock straining against his jeans. Michael wasn’t better off than him, Luke could tell by the sensation of Michael’s clothed dick digging into his hip.

“Michael,” Luke whimpered. Nothing quite set his body on fire like the feeling of Michael kissing him. There were too many layers of clothing between them. Impatiently, Luke ripped at the collar of Michael’s shirt. Michael pulled away, just far enough to tug Luke’s shirt over his head before discarding his own. Luke pulled Michael back in the the buckle of his belt and attached his mouth to Michael’s neck, effectively causing Michael’s hips to stutter against his.

“Fuck, Luke.”

Luke felt hot all over. He popped the button of Michael’s jeans open and slipped his hand past the waistband of Michael’s underwear. Michael groaned as Luke wrapped his hand around the hot flesh of his erection. Luke made sure to thumb over the slit of Michael’s cock before resuming to pump up and down. As Luke had expected, the simple motion made Michael stutter in his motions, his head falling to the crook of Luke’s neck. It made Luke feel drunk, almost, the knowledge that he still knew exactly how to turn Michael on.

Michael wrapped one hand around Luke’s neck and placed the other on the small of Luke’s back before he let it slip farther down, massaging the flesh of Luke’s ass through his jeans.

”What do you want?” Michael asked, his voice barely controlled as Luke was continuing to work his hand up and down and Luke found his own desperation in Michael’s eyes.

“More,” Luke stuttered, his jaw going slack against his will as Michael’s hand went into his boxers and he felt Michael’s index finger rub over his hole. Luke needed everything so he told Michael that, knowing that Michael would tear down the world if Luke would have asked him to. “I need everything.”

Luke pushed his jeans and boxers down and quickly stepped out of them, making sure that his shoes and socks came off as well. He slung his legs around Michael’s waist when Michael picked him up and carried him over to the bed, Luke’s head hitting the mattress with a low thud. Michael stripped quickly and followed him, settled in between Luke’s legs before folding himself over Luke’s chest in order to press their lips back together. Michael pecked him on the mouth once, twice before he pulled away in order to reach for the top drawer of the bedside table.

Luke watched Michael pop open the bottle of lube he had retrieved and spill a generous amount if it onto his fingers, rubbing them against each other to warm up the lube. Then Michael was back on top of him, pressing open-mouthed kisses down Luke’s chest until he reached his crotch. Michael wrapped one hand around the base of his dick and took the tip of Luke’s cock into his mouth as he began to circle Luke’s rim with his finger. Luke gasped when Michael began to push one finger in.

“You okay?” Michael asked him, concern lacing his words.

“Yeah.” Luke nodded hastily. He didn’t want Michael to get the wrong idea and stop. “It’s just been long, is all.”

“Haven’t you… with-”

“No.” Luke shook his head. His heart skipped a beat as a cold hand seized his heart. “We didn’t- we’re not- You?”

Michael’s eyes were ablaze when he met Luke’s. He held Luke’s gaze as he shook his head. “Never.”

And Luke didn’t miss all the different ways in which Michael meant that. Luke pulled Michael back up and slotted their mouths back together, panting against Michael’s lips whenever the burn of the stretch threatened to overwhelm him. Michael worked him open slowly and Luke could tell Michael was struggling to hold back.

“Don’t hold back.” Luke murmured as he clenched around Michael’s fingers and relaxed. “Don’t hold back, Michael.”

Michael shook his head, muttering an unintelligible mess of vowels into Luke’s skin as he began scissoring his fingers. Luke’s back arched, an uninhibited moan spilling over his lips when Michael grazed his prostate.

“Fuck,” Michael muttered and repeated the action, causing Luke to see stars. “Make that sound again, babe.”

Luke squirmed and caught Michael’s face in his hands.

“Please,” he said as urgently as he could and Michael nodded, pulling his fingers out of Luke to leave him clenching on nothing. It took every bit of self control Luke had not to wrap a hand around himself as he watched Michael reach for the bottle of lube and spread some of the slippery liquid all over his dick.

As soon as Michael had lined himself up, he looked up at Luke and Luke saw so many emotions swirling through Michael's green eyes that it made him feel dizzy for a second.

“Are you sure about this?”

And Luke felt his chest constrict almost painfully, he couldn’t breathe past all the love he felt for Michael and the fact that Michael was offering him an out.

“I want this.” Luke did. Nothing in the world could make him pull away, now that he had breached the line. Now that he felt Michael inside and surrounding him again. “I want you. Please, Michael.”

Michael nodded and repositioned himself so that he was hovering above Luke. He pressed their foreheads together and Luke let his eyes flutter close, breathed past the stinging burn of the stretch as Michael pushed into him.

Luke ran his hands up and down Michael’s back as Michael began to move inside of him until Michael took one of his hands and intertwined their fingers, rested them next to Luke’s head.

“Don’t close your eyes,” Michael murmured, his pupils dilated as he met Luke’s eyes, “please. Want to see you.”

Luke nodded and slotted their mouths together, his head falling back onto the pillow as he felt jolts of pleasure zipping up and down his spine, spreading all throughout his body. Luke held Michael’s gaze as he began to gyrate his hips in order to meet Michael’s thrusts. Luke drowned himself in the oceans within Michael’s eyes while Michael rocked into him over and over again.

Slowly but surely, Michael quickened his pace and Luke felt his stomach muscles clench. Heat was rapidly pooling in Luke’s stomach and with a low moan, he slung his arms around Michael’s neck. He was almost there.

“God, you don’t even know what you do to me,” Michael groaned and his grip on Luke’s hip tightened as his pace became almost erratic. The air between them was filled with their panting and the sound of skin slapping against skin.

“Michael,” Luke whined out.

“I know, babe.”

“M-Mich-” Luke didn’t get any further as heat took over his body and his brain short-circuited. Pressing his eyes shut, he dug his nails into the soft flesh of Michael’s shoulders as his body spasmed with pleasure and he covered their stomachs in come.

Michael groaned as Luke clenched around him and wrapped his free hand around Luke’s thigh, spreading Luke’s legs as far as possible as he drove into him at a pace so fast Luke knew he would barely be able to walk tomorrow. It wasn’t long until Michael’s movements stuttered before he fucked into Luke once, twice and then he was coming as well, buried deep inside Luke.

The edges of Luke’s mind went fuzzy as the aftershocks of his own orgasm made his muscles twitch, a low wince escaping him when he felt Michael pull out. For several moments, they just breathed into each other’s mouths before the mattress dipped as Michael scrambled off the bed and onto his feet. He clambered into the en suite bathroom, a feature of Michael being an only child that Luke had always been envious of.

Luke could hear Michael return shortly after and then he felt Michael’s lips against the bare skin of his chest while Michael ran gently the damp washcloth he had retrieved over Luke's crotch, ass and inner thighs. Michael wiped off first Luke’s and then his own stomach before throwing the wash cloth through the open bathroom door. As soon as Michael had lain down next to him, Luke pried his eyes back open. He watched Michael pull the covers over them before he eventually rolled himself onto his side and met Luke’s gaze. Luke studied Michael’s face for a moment. He could feel Michael looking at him even after Luke had averted his eyes.

Luke let out a small yawn, just when Michael’s hand came up to brush his hair off his forehead. His eyes were becoming heavier with each time he blinked. He had nearly dozed off when Michael’s voice pulled him back into the right now.

“Luke?”

Hesitantly, Luke let pried his eyes back open.

“Are you okay?”

Luke took a couple of slow breaths, watching Michael. If Luke let his eyes flutter back shut, he could still feel Michael’s hands roaming over his body, the words he had muttered into Luke’s ear while they had moved together. The expression in Michael’s eyes now was the same as when they had slept together, the same love causing the rest of Luke’s world to fade out, shrink until there was nothing left but Michael, always Michael. It was so easy to pretend they were the only people on earth like this.

“Yeah,” Luke settled on, eventually. “I’m okay.”

Michael leaned forward and Luke couldn’t help the smile that made the corners of his mouth tilt upwards when Michael brushed their lips together. His chest was still heavy but for now, here under the sheets with Michael, Luke could pretend everything was alright.

“God, I missed you so much,” Michael murmured against his jaw, grazing his teeth over the sensitive bone.

“I missed you, too,” Luke curled his hand around Michael’s upper arm. _You don’t even know how much,_ Luke thought. Feeling the weight of Michael’s fingers on his hip, Luke let his eyes flutter shut.

 

 **“I hope we stay thick as thieves** **  
** **Butter and bread, pillars of colonial homes”** **  
** **\- Unconsolable // X Ambassadors**

Luke was impatiently bouncing from one foot onto the other. He craned his neck as far as possible, determined to look over the small crowd of people in front of them. But because neither of the people cared to move out of the way for a small, twelve year-old boy who wanted to look past them, Luke was left to lower himself back down onto the heels of his feet and cross his arms in front of his chest.

“Be patient, Luke, they’ll arrive any second. You’ll just have to wait,” his mother reprimanded him when she noticed his twitchy behaviour.

But Luke didn’t want to wait. Luke had waited six weeks for Michael to return from summer camp. Six weeks filled with nothing to do but reading books and watching his older brothers play football in the backyard. Luke wanted the big yellow bus that had taken Michael away from him to bring him Michael back already. Frowning when he realised that there was still no sign of the yellow bus at the end of the street, Luke casted his eyes down instead and shoved his hand into his back pocket.  

Luke pulled out the postcard that Michael had sent him during his second week at camp. The cardboard was a little worn from the many times Luke had folded the postcard in order for it to fit into the small pocket. Luke tried to smooth it out as best as possible before let his eyes skim over Michael’s chicken scrawl for what felt like the hundredth time.

As opposed to the fit Michael thad thrown when his parents had announced to him at the beginning of summer that they had signed him up for the summer camp, the postcard sounded very enthusiastic. Michael talked about how despite the hot weather and lack of video games, he had become friends with one of the counsellors and so was able to spent his days ditching the program in favour of hanging out with some kids from the oldest group, friends of the counsellor that had signed up for the camp in order to not leave their friend alone. Michael had gotten into a lot of shenanigans with them and at one point they had even went paddling onto the lake in the middle of the night. Luke was happy that Michael seemed to have had a good time. He chewed on his bottom lip and ran his nail over a corner of the postcard over and over again until eventually, the cardboard began to tear.

It was his mother’s voice that made Luke look up. “Luke, what are you doing? The bus is here!”

Alerted, Luke jumped a little to peek a glimpse at the bus that had just pulled up to the curb, its doors opening and a flood of kids spilling out. As soon as he couldn’t take it anymore, Luke elbowed his way past kids hugging their parents and a group of girls all hugging each other goodbye until he had eventually made his way to the front entrance of the bus.

Luke scanned the crowd and was gutted to find that he couldn’t see Michael anywhere. Furrowing his brows, Luke scanned the crowd again, and this time, he spotted Michael. The thirteen year-old  was standing with a couple of kids that had to be at least two or three years older than him. The tallest of them, a lanky boy with chin-length brown hair, had his arm wrapped around Michael’s shoulders. Luke only managed to notice that out of the corner of his eye, though.

His main attention was caught by Michael’s hair. The previously dirty blond strands were a bright, fire truck red now. Apart from the hair, Michael had gained a couple of centimetres during the summer as well and his posture had changed. He was standing more upright now, the expression on his face foreign to Luke. The sight filled Luke with strange nervousness. Suddenly, there was a lump in his throat and Luke’s heart was thumping loudly in his ears. Michael looked so different now. He looked so much more different than _Luke’s_ Michael.

It was then, that Michael looked up and spotted him. Michael’s expression changed as soon as realisation had spread over his features and like that, the ties that had knotted Luke’s stomach were gone.

Because Luke knew that bright grin, always accompanied by this glint of mischief flashing in bright green eyes. Luke knew that slight wiggle of head that Michael only did when he was really excited. Luke felt his own mouth distort into a smile as he watched Michael shake off the arm around his shoulder and take a running start.

Luke uttered a very unmanly squeak as lanky but strong arms wrapped around his middle and he was lifted off the ground.

“Luke!” Michael yelled into his ear and Luke couldn’t help the overwhelming, all-consuming tingle that took over his body. Michael’s presence made him buzz with energy.

“Michael!” Luke cheered right back and took his turn to hug Michael. “You’re back!”

“I’m back!” Michael laughed and reciprocated the hug eagerly, patting Luke on the back so hard that it hurt, but Luke wasn’t going to complain.

“How have you been?” Michael asked him as soon as they had pulled apart. Luke tried to slap away the hand Michael used to card Luke’s fringe out of his eyes, but to no avail. “How was your summer, Lukey? Did your brothers treat you okay or do I need to kick their asses?”

Luke felt his eyebrows rise a little bit at the statement. He had never heard Michael talk about kicking someone’s ass before, not of anyone that was older than them at least.

“Oh, you know,” Luke shrugged, “it was good. Boring without you. Ben and Jack were okay. How was camp, though? Tell me everything!”

“Oh, man, I don’t even know where to start. It was awesome, but I missed you so much, Lukey. Here, let me introduce you to some people.”

Luke found that he had no problems smiling at the new friends Michael had made and slap his hands into the high fives they offered. Luke felt at ease with the weight of Michael’s arm around his shoulder, and the knowledge that Michael may have grown a couple of centimetres and dyed his hair, but that he was still Luke’s Michael underneath and probably always would be.

 

 **“And I said, ‘Hey, what's on your mind?’  
** **I think about my life without you and I start to cry”** **  
** **\- Circles // Pierce The Veil**  


Luke woke up to an empty bed. He lifted his head off the pillow with a groan, a slight crease appearing between his brows as he found Michael’s half of the bed empty. Blinking against the sunlight filtering in through the window, Luke sat up, an audible wince escaping his lips as his ass throbbed in protest at the unexpected movement. Rubbing his hand over his face over and over again, Luke looked around, but to no avail. The sight didn’t change. He was alone in Michael’s room.

Biting his lip harshly, Luke stilled and listened. As far as he could tell, there was no one on the hallway outside either. Carefully, as not to make his sore muscles hurt any more, Luke slid out of bed and began to search for his clothes that were strewn all over the floor. Putting his shoes on was a pain in the ass, literally, but eventually Luke had managed to fully clothe himself.

Once he had tamed the sleep-mussed nest on his head into somewhat of a presentable look, Luke pried open the door to Michael’s room and slowly pulled it shut behind him. The unmistakable smell of bacon and fried eggs gave Luke an idea where Michael had went. Humming, Luke made his way downstairs. He remembered to skip the second last step from the bottom that creaked and made a beeline for the kitchen door.

Luke’s hand was already on the handle when he heard voices, sounding from behind the closed door of the kitchen that made him falter in his movements. His curiosity getting the best of him, Luke pressed his ear against the varnished wood instead of pushing it open.

“... don’t get it, is all.”

Luke recognised Calum’s voice, slightly muffled by the door that was separating them.

“I know, but you can’t really understand that.” That was Michael. He sounded tired, exasperated but not annoyed. Just like he had had this conversation many times before.

“No,” Calum, on the other hand, did sound annoyed, “what I understand is that you’re fucking your ex-boyfriend while said ex-boyfriend is already in a new relationship.”

Luke clasped a hand over his mouth in order to muffel the noise that had escaped him.

“Hey, don’t talk about him like that! And don’t- don’t say it like that. That’s not how it is.”

“Mike,” Calum’s voice gave back, almost pleadingly. “This is a recipe for disaster. And somehow I feel like you’re not going to come out of this unscathed. I’m really scared you’ll get hurt in this, man.”

Luke could hear some rummaging and the sound of cutlery being picked out of a drawer.

After several beats of silence, Michael’s voice said, “I appreciate you trying to look out for me, Cal, I really do, but trust me when I tell you not to worry about that. I get why you’re worried about the other guy, but trust me when I say that I’m not. That’s just a bump in the road. It’s probably even good that Luke started dating him because there’s always this scene in the movies where they break up to like go explore and find themselves and some shit, right? I left and then I fucked up badly and Will is a consequence of that. But Luke is going to break up with him soon and then we’ll be back together. As long as there are clouds in the sky, he’ll always find his way back to me. And if I have to wait a bit for him to do so, then that’s only fair.”

“Mhm.” For a moment, Luke thought that Calum was going to drop the topic after that. “What about you, though?”

“What about me?” Michael asked.

“Are you sure you’re going to be happy?”

Michael’s reply came within a heartbeat, made Luke’s heart skip a beat. “He’s my happiness.”

“Okay,” Luke could hear Calum relent, if relucantly so. “If you say so.”

“I do.”

For a couple of seconds there was nothing but the sound of cutlery moving over plates, before Michael spoke up again. “Listen, I know you can’t really understand this because you haven’t got a Luke but it’s like… he made me, you know? Luke was my whole world when we were younger and I need it to be that way again. And it will be that way again. Luke will always be it for me. It will always be us. And this all is just one hardship in the life that we’ll have. Something that we’ll laugh about when we’re forty and married, sitting in our house with our dog and a white picket fence.”

“And does Luke know that the white picket fence isn’t an option anymore?”

Luke furrowed his brows and pressed himself impossibly closer to the door, trying to hear Michael’s answer, but it never came.

“What?” Calum said. “Don’t look at me like that, Michael. You know it’s true. You told me this life broke you two once before. Who’s to say that it’s not going to happen a second time?”

Luke couldn’t make out Michael’s answer. Michael’s voice was drowned out by the blood rushing in his ears, his heart thumping against his rib cage. Pushing himself off the door with shaking hands, Luke made a beeline for the front door. Once he was outside, he didn’t stop running until he had reached his own home.


	7. Chapter 7

**“Take me down, let it take another bow now  
** **You know that I can't stay sober yet”** **  
** **\- Two Stones // Walking On Cars**

 

“Morning!” Will greeted him with a short peck on the lips when Luke entered the back room of the coffee shop. Luke forced himself to smile, quickly dove under Will’s arms where he was busy hoisting a fresh sack of coffee beans off the storage shelf. “Your mum came by earlier, the new espresso machine finally arrived and she wants it set up as soon as possible. I had the delivery guy show me how, so I can do it and I’d just need you to cover the counter.”

Luke nodded, pulling his apron over his head and tying the strings behind his back. “That’s cool.”

He jolted a little when he looked up to find Will leaning with his shoulder against his locker, his dark eyes fixed on Luke intently.

“Are you okay? You look tired. Didn’t get much sleep last night?”

Luke collected his heart from his knees before he rubbed the back of his head. Luke supressed the urge to violently shake his head when he remembered the feeling of Michael’s hands tangling in his hair the night before, the feeling of Michael’s mouth on his lips, the feeling of Michael inside him.

Luke forced the grimace on his face into a sheepish expression. “Yeah, I… I fell asleep watching 60 Minutes.”

“Good thing you work in a coffee shop, then!”

Luke reciprocated Will’s grin with one of his own and watched with relief as Will turned around, gathered up the sack of coffee beans and carried them out to the counter area on one shoulder. Luke made sure that his expression was schooled into his neutral but friendly customer face before he followed Will out into the shop.

The morning in rush was thankfully already over and so Luke kept himself busy by wiping the counters and occasionally walking by the few tables that were currently occupied. He jolted, every time the bell above the door jingled. It was never a mop of blond hair with blue splattered on top that he spotted, though and eventually, Luke relaxed, made sure to keep close to the counter once Will started unboxing the espresso machine.

It was almost noon when Michael appeared in the shop, a baseball cap pulled down low into his face, his eyes obstructed by a pair of shades despite the drizzling rain outside. Luke made sure that Will was still engrossed in setting up the espresso machine before he snatched up a wet cloth from the sink and made a beeline for Michael, pushing the other man down into a booth out of sight from the register before he bent himself over the table, began to wipe the already spotless tabletop.

“You can’t be here.”

Michael squinted at him, Luke could tell despite the sunglasses.

Michael’s voice was soft when he spoke, “I made you breakfast this morning. You weren’t there.”

Luke felt his hand cease its movements on the table. A moment later, Michael took the cloth out of Luke’s hands and replaced it with his own. Luke felt nauseous, so he let himself fall into the bench opposite of Michael. Michael had taken off his shades and Luke hated it, hated all the love and honest wonder in Michael’s eyes.

“I couldn’t stay.”

Michael nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching, “Okay. Can you …” Michael looked where their hands were still intertwined. Michael’s grasp around his fingers became almost painfully tight for a moment. “... tell me why?”

“I…” Luke couldn’t swallow past the lump in his throat. He didn’t know how he could convey to Michael how he was feeling. Luke had spent the whole morning with Calum’s words replaying in his head, _“You told me this life broke you two once before. Who’s to say that it’s not going to happen a second time?”_

And Calum was right. Michael was here now, but he would have to leave eventually. Michael would leave and leave Luke behind again. And once he was gone, Michael might fade again, whirled away by the fast and high life that he had always dreamt of. Too fast and too high for Luke to even grasp. Michael’s life had turned into a carousel, spinning too swiftly for Luke to jump onto the platform. It was just hard, to have Michael in front of him, to see the way Michael looked at him and cling to that resolution. So Luke was left silent.

It was a low shout that made the both of them look up, followed by the sound of expensive coffee machine parts clattering to the ground and a string of mild curses. Michael’s gaze darkened as his eyes stayed fixed towards the counter area for several moments, but cleared when he looked back at Luke.

“Did you break up with him yet?” Michael asked it nonchalantly, as if he was just making easy conversation.

Luke could feel it, a physical pain in his chest. It was a giant knot in his head, all his emotions tangling up the windings up his brain.

Luke looked anywhere in the room, but Michael’s face when he answered, “I’m… not sure if I want to.”

He could feel it, Michael’s silence and the words it smothered. When Luke eventually gathered the courage to meet Michael’s eyes, Michael nodded at him, nothing more than an infinitesimal tilt of his head. His eyes were hollow as he stood up. “Okay.”

“Michael...”

Luke could see it in Michael’s eyes, the silent, burning plead to speak up, begging Luke to say something and mend them. But Luke couldn’t. He couldn’t get back together with Michael and lose him again. Luke wouldn’t survive that a second time.

After several, long moments, Luke watched Michael’s shoulders sag before he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and threw a tenner on the table. For what, Luke wasn’t sure. Not sparing him another glance, Michael turned around, left Luke to look after him. He stayed in the booth, long after the bell above the door had chimed and Michael had left the coffee shop. Once Luke could breathe past the overwhelming yearning in his chest, he pulled himself to his feet and got back to work.

The rest of the day dragged on like bubble gum and Luke was more than thankful when he got to clock out at seven. Will had gone an hour earlier than him because he had some kind of family dinner to attend and Luke was thankful for that, too. Luke felt an overwhelming sense of guilt whenever he looked at Will just to find his boyfriend already smiling brightly at him. But Luke knew that he deserved that. His head was aching.

Luke blamed it on the incessant pounding in the back of his head that he missed the bright red truck parked in his driveway when he made his way up the stairs to his house. It wasn’t until he pushed his front door open to hear his mother mother exclaiming his name that Luke noticed all the lights in the house were on. Not a second later, Luke found himself attacked, a loud wince escaping him as he was captured in a headlock.

“Ow, fuck! Get off of me, you mother-”

“Wow, language, Lukey! Who taught you such naughty words? Our dear mother didn’t raise you like that, did she?”

“No, she did not!” Luke could hear his mother supply from the kitchen. When Luke craned his neck despite the arm slung around it to look at her apologetically, Liz winked at him. There was a new glow in her eyes, one that always appeared whenever one of her children came home.

Luke pushed against his brother’s chest, suppressed the urge to deck Jack in the face in favour of sauntering into the kitchen and pecking his mother on the cheek.

“What are you doing here?” he directed at Jack whose upper body had disappeared into the fridge.

“Semester break, dearest brother,” Jack answered as he reemerged, popping the cap of a soda can.

“Already?” Luke cast a quick glance at the calendar hanging on the wall.

Jack clutched his chest, “Ah gee, nice to know you missed me, little bro.”

“Eh, what can I say.” Luke shrugged while he walked towards the living room. “Ben’s my favourite brother.”

He took off into a running start when he heard Jack curse behind him. Luke couldn’t help the uncontrollable laughter that spilled out of his mouth as Jack tackled him and sent them both sailing over the back rest of the couch. They wrestled for a couple of moments before Luke found himself back in a headlock, his legs vainly kicking out against the arm rest of the couch.

Jack laughed into his ear before he let him go, ruffling Luke’s hair. “Missed you, fucker.”

Luke gasped, directing a glance towards the kitchen. Jack pressed a finger to his lips and winked. Then he slung his arm around Luke’s neck and pulled him against his chest so the back of Luke’s head was resting on his shoulder.

“Now, Mum’s been telling me all about exciting things happening around here. Care to tell me all about that? She said you were ‘more fit’ to tell me.”

“Well...” Luke tried to keep his face composed into something calm. “Michael’s back.”

Jack took a sip of his soda, still safely clutched in his hand before he asked, “Who now?”

“Michael Clifford.”

Luke whined when a big splash of soda soiled the front of his shirt. “Hey!”

Shuddering at the cold liquid running down his stomach, Luke wriggled around until he was facing Jack. Jack’s eyes were unfocussed, the can in his hand gouged in.

“What?” he asked eventually, blinking until his eyes refocussed. “What, Luke?”

“Uh…” And it was then that Luke remembered the last time he had talked to his brother, both of his brothers, about Michael. Luke hurried to get off the couch, just so managed to catch Jack before he was out the door.

“No, let me go! Luke!”

“Jack!”

“I just want to talk to him.” Jack smiled at him as he struggled against the hands Luke had clutched into his collar, the distorted grin causing chills to run down Luke’s spine. “Have a few words, you know? Just old neighbours talking.”

“I slept with him,” Luke blurted out. The words took a few moments to settle between them, Jack’s eyes widening so far that Luke got scared they might pop out of his brother’s head. But then Jack’s gaze darkened.

“Hey, mum!” the older man called out. “Lukey and I are going to sit down on the back porch for a little bit! Take your time with dinner!”

Next, Jack grabbed his arm and pulled Luke towards the terrace door. His voice was deadly calm when he said, “Come on, little bro. I think there’s quite a lot you have to tell me.”

 

 **“When they closed their eyes and prayed you would change  
** **And they cut your hair and sent you away”** **  
** **\- Twin Size Mattress // The Front Bottoms**

 

“Hey, Hemmings, wait up!”

Luke spun around when he heard his name being called. From across the schoolyard, far back where the high schoolers had claimed the picnic tables as their territory, he could see a lanky boy jog towards him, his chin-length hair flopping into his eyes as he did so.

Luke ignored the raised eyebrows Ian and Paul, two of his friends from math class, were giving him and forced a smile onto his face, “Don’t wait up for me, guys.”

Ian’s eyes darted curiously back and forth between Luke and the approaching figure before Paul pulled him away with an eyeroll and a “Bye, Luke! See you tomorrow!”

“Hey,” Jayden greeted him as soon as he had arrived by Luke’s side, his breathing barely strained.

Luke nodded, feeling a little bit intimidated. He had talked to Jayden before, had even hung around his basement several times and petted his dog that one time he had been brave enough to go into the kitchen alone to get some water, but Luke had never talked to the sophomore on his own. Jayden was Michael’s friend, ever since Michael had gone to summer camp that one time and befriended Jayden who had been a counsellor there.

“What’s up?” Luke asked, trying to sound as nonchalantly as possible, and jammed his hands into the pockets of his school slacks.

Jayden smiled at him, but his eyes were filled with concern which, in return, left Luke concerned. “I need to talk to you about Mike.”

“Oh,” Luke felt his shoulders tense, “okay.”

Jayden nodded, the glint of something in his eyes that was a tad too savvy for Luke’s liking. “So you know Ini got detention and has to work at the school office this week, right?”

Luke nodded. He hadn’t known that but he could tell that wasn’t really the point of Jayden’s story.

“Yeah, well Ini overheard a phone call between one of the secretaries and the police. They’re dispatching a CPS type of shit person because Mike has skipped school too often. The secretary said they might take Michael away from his parents if he doesn’t start showing up to his classes.”

Luke felt a cold hand seize his heart. His nails were digging into the palms of his hands where his fingers had balled into fists seemingly on their own. The school was trying to get Michael taken away from his parents, away from Luke.

“Okay,” Luke managed to press out.

“You need to talk to him.” Jayden searched his eyes for a moment, his expression smoothing out a bit when he saw that Luke had understood what he was trying to say. “Convince him to start dragging his ass to this hellhole place, and that regularly. I’ve tried before but he didn’t really listen to me, to you however-”

“Seeley!” one of the high schoolers yelled over the yard. Luke thought his name to be Jake or Josh or something.

Jayden flipped the other guy off before turning back to Luke. “I gotta go, but just talk to him alright? He listens to you.”

Luke nodded, shooting Jayden a reflexive smile when the older boy clapped him on the back before returning to his friends.

Luke was still thinking about Jayden’s words when he found himself perched on his window sill that evening, one leg dangling in the air outside, the other into his room. It was drizzling, but Luke welcomed the cool sensation against his skin as he looked through the opened curtains into Michael’s room. Michael’s mother had flicked on the ceiling light, allowing Luke an uninhibited view as he watched Michael’s parents talk to the corner of Michael’s room that held his bed.

Luke didn’t have to be able to see Michael, or hear what his parents were saying to gather how the conversation went. He had seen the CPS car in front of the Clifford’s house when he had come home from school. At one point, Karen started crying, Michael’s dad rubbing her back helplessly as he continued to talk. But Luke could tell he was at a loss, like all adults were when it came to Michael. 

Shortly after, Michael’s parents left his room and Luke let himself fall back into his room. He didn’t bother closing his window as he flopped himself down on his bed. Not a minute later, there was a couple of heavy thuds, the unmistakeable sound of feet over his floor and the Luke felt a hand in his hair where he lay with his face pressed into the mattress.

Sighing heavily, Luke rolled himself over so he was half on top of Michael, his ear resting on the side of Michael’s chest that was absent a heartbeat. “They want to take you away.”

Michael’s chest revibrated as he hummed. “Missed school too often. They say if I miss one more class they’re gonna put me in a group home or something where the school bus is a police car.”

“Are you going to go school tomorrow then?”

Michael looked down at him for only a second before he averted his eyes, shrugged. “Dunno yet … maybe.”

“Michael-”

“It kills me, Luke.” Luke snapped his mouth shut, allowed Michael to speak. He could tell that Michael needed to. He knew that Michael’s parents surely hadn’t let him. “It kills me to sit in a stuffy room for eight hours every day, listening to teachers that couldn’t give less of a shit about whether we learn something of use or not. I’m not like you, I don’t have fun when I get handed a paper full of equations. I can feel myself dying, just sitting there dressed up like my dad and doing nothing, watching the hours pass. It’s not for me. I can’t do it, I… it’s not me.”

Luke bit his lip, kept his eyes cast downward as he blindly placed his hand onto Michael’s cheek. He had known that Michael was unhappy. Luke couldn’t recall a time that Michael had ever enjoyed school, but Luke hadn’t known how far Michael’s suffering went. Michael had always fallen out of line, with his hair and the ‘creative freedom’ that he took when it came to wearing his school uniform. And Luke was almost glad that he only knew half the things Michael got up to with Jayden and his friends before Michael climbed into Luke’s bed, so early in the morning Luke often only ever realised Michael was there in the first place when he woke up for school. Luke had frowned upon Michael staying in bed on most of those mornings, but he had figured that it was Michael’s decision, his faith in Michael and the knowledge how truly smart Michael was prohibiting him from speaking up. But now it was different. Now they were going to take Michael away.

“You have to go to school, Michael.” Luke looked up and he hated the way Michael’s eyes screamed betrayal at him as Luke grit his teeth and continued on.“Please, it’s not that long anymore.”

“Four years,” Michael huffed and he knew Michael wasn’t mad at him but the way he disregarded Luke’s words so easily made Luke’s heart seize in his chest. Luke lashed out with the only thing he knew that held actual leverage over Michael.

“You won’t be able to play music in a group home, Michael.” Luke sat up onto his knees, balled his fists in his lap. “You have to go to school. You have to… you have to find a way or else you’ll lose your guitar and… and everything else too.”

Luke hadn’t expected the panic but suddenly it was there and he couldn’t breathe anymore. Michael was almost as fast as the panic, wrapping him up in his arms and slowly rocking them back and forth. Luke didn’t cry, even though he wanted to. He didn’t have time to cry. He needed to convince Michael to listen to him. Jayden had been right. If Michael were to listen to anyone, it would be Luke.

To Luke’s surprise, the expression on Michael’s face was soft when Michael  pulled away in order cup Luke’s face between his hands. “It’s okay, Lukey.”

Luke grit his teeth and shook his head. It was obviously not okay.

“I’ll do it.” That made Luke’s head whip up, so fast it were probably only Michael’s hands fixating his head that prohibited Luke from breaking his own neck. Michael shot him a smile, small but determined. “I’ll find a way to survive the next four years. Survive the last three months of this year without skipping in the first place. I’ll go to school. I promise I won’t let them take me away from you. We’ll stay together.” Michael leaned forward and pressed their lips together. “I promise.”

“Okay.” Luke’s eyes burned with unspilt tears as he spoke. Michael’s expression darkened as he noticed the brimming state of Luke’s eyes so Luke kissed him until he could feel Michael smile against his lips. Then he pressed their foreheads together. “Okay. Thank you.”

Michael just pulled him further onto his lap until Luke was straddling him, buried his face in the crook of Luke’s neck. Luke mouthed silent words of gratitude into Michael’s hair while they stayed like that, Michael’s hands drawing patterns onto Luke’s skin where he had slipped his hands underneath the hem of Luke’s shirt.

They stayed like this until Luke began to get uncomfortable. Michael noticed and began to maneuver Luke off his lap, his hand grazing Luke’s crotch accidentally. Luke whimpered and Michael’s eyes widened in realisation as he scanned Luke up and down for the source of his discomfort.

“Luke,” Michael breathed out. Luke looked to the side. He could feel his cheeks heat up. Michael blew air onto his nose, rolled his eyes when Luke squinted at him. “You should have said something.”

Luke whined, “No, it’s stupid.” He tried to clamber off of Michael’s lap, glaring at Michael when the other boy kept him in place. “Just cuddling with you shouldn’t make me feel that way. ‘s embarrassing. That were like five minutes. “

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Michael frowned at him. “It’s only me. Besides… I like it.”

Michael’s eyes glistened with that certain kind of darkness that made Luke’s problem only worse as he added, “I like it that I make you feel that way. Can I- can I touch it?”

Luke felt his breath hitch at the words and his mind wandered to the times they had done this before. It had never more than a few touches, a little needed friction through palms pressed against each other’s jeans when they had kissed late at night. Luke was used to kissing Michael. What Michael suggested, though, they had never done before.

“Yeah,” Luke breathed out, “yeah, okay.”

Michael nodded, beaming as he pecked Luke on the lips and then kissed him more deeply, flopping them to the side so Luke landed on his back and Michael could hover above him, bracing one of Luke’s legs with his own, his thigh pressing against Luke’s boner.

Luke’s mouth fell open when he felt Michael’s mouth latch onto his neck, Michael’s head slipping beneath the waistband of his jeans and into his boxers. The moment Michael’s hand, still cool from the drizzle outside, wrapped around his hot flesh, Luke lost all ability to speak. He merely managed to produce a low whining sound when Michael asked him whether he was okay. Once Luke had reassured him to go on, Michael began to slowly pump his hand up and down, using the precome leaking from the tip of Luke’s cock to smooth his way down.

“Does it feel good?” Michael asked him, uncertainty making his voice seem almost foreign to Luke. Luke hurried to nod, curled his hand around Michael’s upper arm as he answered. Somehow, he found it hard to keep his eyes open, not when the hot, bright sensation of pleasure was zipping up and down his spine. “Yeah, feels really good if you do it. Please, don’t stop.”

Michael smiled at him, warmly with an underlying, different kind of heat in his gaze and then pressed their lips back together as he continued to stroke his hand up and down. Luke felt his skin bruise when Michael went back to sucking at his neck. Normally, he would have pushed Michael’s head further down, make sure all the hickeys Michael left on him ended up somewhere he could cover, but this time, Luke couldn’t bring himself to care. And it was worth the please expression in Michael’s eyes, the perpetual glint of mischief in them bright as he pulled the collar of Luke’s shirt to leave more marks on his collar bone.

“Michael,” Luke gasped as Michael began to rock against his thigh, the hard cock of his best friend heavy against his leg. And maybe it was that feeling that tipped Luke over the edge, the knowledge that Michael wasn’t any better off than him, that Michael was just as desperate to be touched as Luke was. Luke came with a shout that was entirely too loud to be uttered by him at ten pm on a school night. Michael kissed him while Luke felt stars erupt behind his eyelids and spilled over all over Michael’s fingers. Michael stroked his hair while Luke revelled in his high, pressing open-mouthed kisses to the side of his face until eventually, the movement of Michael’s hips against his leg ceased and Michael shuddered, his grip on Luke’s hair tightening momentarily. Michael positively collapsed on him. Luke wheezed, but slung his arms around Michael nonetheless.

“Uhm-” Michael cleared his throat after some time. “Can I borrow one of your sweatpants?”

Luke laughed and Michael joined in after a moment.

“Sure,” Luke pressed out in between fits of laughter and rolled Michael off of him so he could get up. Michael pulled him back onto the bed by his hand once Luke had returned. They struggled to shimmy out of their jeans while lying down but eventually the both of them had managed.

“Come here,” Michael asked once Luke had thrown the balled up heap of soiled pants into the designated dirty-clothes-corner of his room. Willingly, Luke curled himself against Michael’s chest.

“Thank you.”

Luke blinked up at the other boy, tilted his head in question. “For what?”

Michael looked at him for a moment before shaking his head. There were red streaks running down the side of his face where sweat had fallen from his hair. “Nothing. Sleep well, Lukey.”

Luke felt confused for a moment, but decided to let it go. He had already changed Michael’s mind once today. Doing it twice in one day would have come to close to a miracle. Burying his face back in Michael’s chest, Luke let his eyes flutter close.


	8. Chapter 8

  **“When the weight of the world is held in our hands** ****  
**We have to take the strain just to save our plans”** **  
** **\- Sinking Ships // Venus Demilo**  

“So,” Jack said as soon as he had settled next to Luke on the outdoor sofa in their backyard, his arms crossed in front of his chest. “Spill.”

Luke squirmed under his brother’s harsh gaze but forced himself to look into Jack’s eyes as he told him what had happened. A part of Luke was relieved, finally being able to talk about it with someone. “I thought I hated him when he walked back into my life.”

“Yeah, you better,” Jack muttered under his breath but let Luke speak.

“And I did for some time, I think. It just… it hurt so much. After the fallout and after I had told him I never wanted to see him again, he just disappeared completely. I mean, obviously not really because his face has been everywhere since the band took off, but I had expected him to fight or come back here. But he didn’t.”

For a second, there was the flash of something in Jack’s eyes but it was gone too quickly for Luke to decipher what it had been. Luke decided that it had probably just Jack trying to rein in his temper.

Letting his gaze drop to his hands, Luke continued, “And then suddenly he did come back. Without a warning, just walked into the coffee shop like he had never been gone and that hurt so much, having him back here. The first evening he told me he came back to get me back and _after a year_ of nothing I was so angry. I tried to shut him out, I really did, but he was everywhere and it was so good to have him around again, to hear his voice again alone was just...”

“You could have just turned on the radio for that.”

Luke smiled at his brother.

Jack’s gaze softened. He sighed. “I thought you were happy with what’s-his-name.”

“Will.”

“Yeah, I thought you were happy with Will. Mum was always very fond of him on the phone, said he treated you well, made you smile and stuff.”

“He does.” Now it was Luke turn to sigh. “Will’s great, he’s- he’s kind and polite and really hot- sorry.” Luke laughed at Jack’s scrunched up expression. “He makes me happy, he does, but…”

Luke rubbed a hand over his face.

“... but he’s not Michael,” Jack finished for him. His expression was solemn, absent judgement and Luke felt indefinitely consoled by the knowledge that Jack was on his team no matter what.

“He’s not Michael,” Luke reaffirmed.

“Oh, Luke.”

“When Michael kisses me-” Luke ignored the low retching voice Jack uttered and kicked his brother in the shin before continuing- “When he kisses me, there’s just him, you know? When he’s with me then he’s just Michael, _my_ Michael, the boy I’ve loved since I was four years old. I love him. Even now. Even after everything that has happened. I shouldn’t, but I do. I don’t know what it’s like to not love him. I need him in my life like I need air.” Luke’s eyes wandered upwards. A moment later, let his face drop into his hands. “Jack, am I a terrible person?”

“Hey, now.”

Luke looked up when he felt his brother’s hands on his shoulders.

Jack looked at him intently before letting himself fall back into the cushions of the sofa. “I won’t condone the fact that you cheated on your boyfriend. _That_ is terrible. But you are not your mistakes, Luke. You are not a terrible person.”

“Thank you,” Luke rasped out.

Jack pulled his legs against his chest, rested his hands on his kneecaps before he began to speak. Luke could see the promise ring on Jack’s middle finger glisten. “I think you’re a typical Hemmings. Mum and dad, Celeste and I… and you and Michael. Once we’ve found the one, that’s it for us. You just have to figure out what you want. Because Michael’s not just yours anymore. Shit, I couldn’t walk through the airport without seeing him smouldering down at me.”

“He doesn’t _smoulder_.” Luke scrunched up his nose.

Jack laughed. “Hell yeah, he does! Have you ever looked at one of those magazine covers? Though, objectively speaking, I don’t know why he’s the hyped one. I think the one with the bandana fetish is way hotter.”

"Jack!”

“Just saying.” His brother grinned and Luke couldn’t help but feel a little bit better.

They sat in amicable silence for a couple of moments before Luke asked the final question, “So what am I supposed to do now?”

Jack’s grin faded into a smile, but he grabbed Luke’s shoulder, squeezed it in comfort. “I think you know what you’re supposed to do.”

“Yeah.” Luke nodded and let his head drop into the cushions, blinked at the stars. He did know.

“Great.” With an obscene groan, Jack pulled himself to his feet, before offering Luke his hand. “Now, let’s go inside. Mum’s cooked and I waited a whole semester to eat myself into a food coma.”

 

 **“And I will burn the people who hurt you the most and I will not learn** ****  
**'Cause I am too young and too dumb to consider the terms”** **  
** **\- Bloodsport // Raleigh Ritchie**

“Okay, Luke, take over. Make sure that the water is boiling before you add it to the Erlenmeyer.”

Accepting the tongs Paul offered him, Luke switched places with his friend and adjusted the flame of the Bunsen burner. Luke focussed on pivoting the test tube over it with practice movements, so he missed the sound of the door opening. It was only when Ian next to him gasped that Luke looked up, blinked through the grimey glasses of the protective goggles he was wearing.

The Science Club met on Friday afternoons, the only time they had managed to secure themselves a time slot for the chemistry lab. This meant that the school was usually deserted whenever they had their weekly meet-ups. And Michael, usually, was one of the very first people to flee the school halls around that time. So Luke knew something was wrong as he spotted Michael standing in the doorway of the classroom, even before Luke spotted the blood covering the lower half of Michael’s face, dripping from his nose onto the front of his shirt. For a few, long seconds the entire room stood still. It was the sound of the test tube bursting that startled Luke into motion. Hastily, he let the tongs drop onto the table.

“Uhm, alright, guys! I think it’s time for lunch,” Paul announced next to him, pulling off his protective goggles and grabbing Pana and Dan by their respective shirt sleeves. The two of them were new, had joined the club only two weeks ago, as Luke was reminded by the horrified expressions on their face. They had never witnessed Michael barging into a room like that before. Luke wanted to sigh. “C’mon, let’s get some sandwiches from the vending machine. Ian, you too.”

Luke shot his friend a grateful smile as Paul ushered the rest of their science club out of the room. Paul gave him a quick nod and shot Michael a disgruntled, but still intimidated glance before he squeezed himself past and shut the door behind himself.

Luke felt his shoulders fall the moment he was alone with Michael. Carefully, he took off the protective goggles he was still wearing and placed them on the table next to the now shut off Bunsen burner. Luke stalked over to where Michael had backed away against the door frame in order to let Luke’s friends through. Slowly, Luke let his fingers ghost over the blood swollen state of Michael’s nose, the cut in his lip. Michael watched him carefully, his eyes gleaming.

He was standing with his shoulders squared and head held high, wearing the scarlet coating on his lower face as proudly as the one in his hair. Michael wasn’t dumb enough to boast, but Luke could tell by the look in Michael’s eyes that Michael didn’t feel the slightest bit of remorse. Luke would have bet his entire allowance that Michael had started whatever fight he had gotten into.

Balling his fingers into a fist, Luke let his eyes flutter shut and took a few, deep breaths. Then he took Michael’s hand and pulled him towards the teacher’s desk.

“You should see the other guy?” Michael tried as Luke pushed him down on the chair behind it.  

Luke ignored Michael in favour of retrieving the first aid kit hidden in the bottom drawer of the desk. It was quiet between the two of them while Luke cleaned Michael’s face with a wet paper towel.

“Do you wanna tell me what happened?” Luke asked eventually as he turned to cleaning the busted knuckles of Michael’s right hand. The sight made Luke’s stomach churn but he didn’t let any of it show on his face. Once he had scrubbed the dirt and blood off of Michael’s skin as best as possible, Luke threw the heap of soaked, stained paper towels into the bin below the teacher’s desk and turned to rummage through the first aid kit instead.

“Uh… nothing, really.”

Luke raised his eyebrows at Michael. Then he averted his eyes to the packet of gauze in his hands, ripped it open. He could hear Michael sigh.

“I had a conversation with Nate.”

Michael grimaced when Luke looked up at him. “Nate Chadwick?”

Luke knew the other boy. Nate was in his English class and the treasurer of the robotics club. He didn’t strike Luke as someone who would get in a fight, lest in one with Michael. Luke hadn’t thought himself and Nate to be friends per se, but they were definitely something like acquaintances. Nate had helped him build up his stand at the science fair earlier this year.

Michael nodded and grit his teeth when Luke began to dab the cut on his lip with iodium.  “Fucker thought he could make his irrelevant opinions known in front of me, so I … told him that he needs to shut the fuck up.”

“With your fists?”

Michael shrugged. “He deserved it.”

“Michael, that’s not-” Luke furrowed his brows, squinted at Michael when the other boy refused to meet his eyes. “What did he say?”

“Not important.”

“Michael.”

Michael sighed. His green eyes were ablaze with cold fury as he met Luke’s gaze. “He had to say something about you… and me.”

Luke’s heart skipped a beat before it continued on twice as fast as before. A cold, acidic hand gripped Luke’s stomach, tied it into knots. Luke tried hard not to let it show on his face. It was rare, that Luke had to deal with things like that. Some had tried to mess with him at the beginning of his freshman year, but between his brothers, Michael’s junior friends and Michael himself the number of people intent of crossing Luke had quickly diminished. He ducked down his head. “Oh.”

“Luke.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Luke mumbled and tried hard to focus on clipping the bandage he had wrapped around Michael’s busted knuckles.

“Luke, hey!" Michael leaned forward and Luke couldn’t help the small, reflexive smile that tugged on the corners of his mouth when Michael gently pinched Luke’s chin between his fingers. The smell of gauze was heavy in the air as Michael tilted Luke’s head upwards so Luke met his eyes. “Listen to me, Chadwick confused his mouth with his asshole and thought that the load of bullshit he was spewing was an acceptable opinion. I corrected him and now he knows better. And you don’t have to spend a single second worrying about that or him anymore, okay? I won’t let anybody talk shit about you like that in front of me, about this.” Michael gestured in between them. “What we have is the best thing in the world, okay? He’s just a backward scumbag. He doesn’t matter jack shit. All that matters is you and me.”

Luke nodded, prying Michael’s fingers from his chin in favour of intertwining them with his own.

“I know, I know,” he muttered. He sighed when he looked up. “You have to stop punching your way out of things, though. It looks bad on your record, Michael.”

“So," Michael shrugged, "all rockstars have bad report cards.”

“Nate will tell his parents, and Mr Lowell.”

“I don’t care.“ Michael sneered. “He’s a teacher’s pet anyways.”

Luke couldn’t help the slight sting at Michael’s words. In order to hide his face from Michael, Luke stood up and began to throw the unused roll of gauze and scissors back into the first aid kit. He knew that Michael had realised his mistake when Michael inhaled sharply behind him. A moment later, Michael’s arms snaked around his waist, pulled Luke back against him.

“I’m sorry.” Michael pressed a chaste kiss against the side of Luke’s face from behind. “I didn’t mean it like that. You know I’m really proud of you for being good at all this school stuff.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you would behave more like a teacher’s pet sometimes. Most of them think you’re a bad kid already.”

“Hey, cut me some slack, please. I come here everyday and listen to their bullshit. That’s already the best I can do. Besides, I don’t care what any of them think of me. I only care what you think of me.”

And Luke hated it, hated the way Michael made his cheeks heat up and butterflies flutter around in his stomach so easily.

“Are we good?” Michael asked, a lot more tentatively than before and Luke wriggled around in Michael's arms to search Michael’s eyes. The green in them gleamed in the afternoon sun that was falling in through the windows, made them seem almost blueish. Luke smiled at the love in Michael’s eyes and the genuine remorse. Michael grinned when he saw the corners of Luke’s mouth lift.

“Good,” Michael announced and pecked Luke on the lips. “Because I love you.”

“I love you too.” Luke sighed. “As long as there are clouds in the sky, I will always love you. ”

Michael beamed and then pulled him closer. He pecked Luke’s temple as he hugged him before pulling away and brushing a few stray strands out of Luke’s forehead.  

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to butt into your nerd club thingy. That thing that exploded wasn’t like… super important, was it?”

“Just water.” Luke chuckled lightly. “It’s fine. I’m pretty sure you traumatised Pana and Dan though, and Ian is scared shitless of you anyways.”

“Good.”

Luke rolled his eyes at the entirely too pleased look on Michael’s face. A second later, Michael’s phone went of. Luke could feel it vibrate against his leg. Michael pulled it out of his pocket, tapped away on it for a moment before looking up at Luke.

“Jayden is coming to pick me up. Do you wanna ditch the rest of your club meeting and come get pizza with us?”

“No.” Luke shook his head. “I need to clean up and then set up the trial again. Paul’s cool with you barging in here, used to it by now probably, but he will get mad if I just take off.”

“Okay, I’ll see you tonight. I’ll bring you a slice back.”

Luke smiled as Michael leaned forward to kiss him, shortly but deeply, and then Michael was walking backwards towards the door. Luke shook his head and turned back towards the table they had set their experiment up on. Willing the stupid grin to fall from his face, Luke began to collect the shards of the test tube.

 

 **“But I remember the nights when you'd lie with me** ****  
**Where we'd talk and we'd touch and we'd fall asleep”** **  
** **\- Long Night // With Confidence**

Luke kept the lights off as he walked into his room after dinner. Instead, he made a beeline for his window, pushed the pane up and perched himself on the sill. Opposite of his window, Luke could see Michael pace around in his room, visible due to the ceiling light illuminating the room. Michael was on the phone, spinning the cap he had worn earlier around his pointer finger.

He seemed annoyed, Luke could tell by the downwards twist to his mouth, the agitated way in which he was speaking. Luke revelled in the sight, nonetheless. He allowed himself to watch for a little while longer until Michael hung up. Michael threw his phone on what Luke knew to be his bed before flinging himself after it.

Luke took that as his cue to move. It had been nearly nearly two years since Luke had last lowered himself out of his window and climbed onto the slim but unyielding branches of the tree between their windows. It was an act of balance, one that Luke had done countless times before, nonetheless he was more than glad as soon as he had clambered around the trunk and his footing became more secure on the especially thick branch that reached up to Michael’s window. Luke cursed his short nails as he tried to push up the screen but eventually, he had managed. Uttering a silent curse, Luke curled his hands around the window frame and hoisted himself through the window.

“What the-” Michael sat up once he noticed Luke hanging halfway into his room, eyes becoming almost comically wide.

“A little bit of help would be appreciated,” Luke wheezed out, struggling to get his leg over the window frame. Michael was on his feet within a heartbeat, pulling Luke into his room the rest of the way. Michael must’ve underestimated his weight however, as they both toppled to the ground once Luke had made it through the window.

Michael groaned from where Luke had buried him beneath his torso. Hastily, Luke scrambled to his feet. Michael’s curiosity remained the most prominent expression on his face as he slowly pulled himself to his feet as well. Luke could see the sadness underneath.

“What are you doing here?” Michael asked eventually, refusing to meet Luke’s eyes.

Luke could taste iron where he was worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. His heart was pounding in his chest, begging him to leave, jump straight back out the window again. But Luke couldn’t. Jack had been right. He knew what he was supposed to do now, what he needed to do.

“I can’t be with you,” Luke said and watched Michael’s face fall. There was a twitch in Michael’s hands, a flash of hurt in Michael’s eyes that was ozone, announcing lightning and the clap of thunder to follow. It wouldn’t strike while Luke was still there, still close enough to get hurt. But later, when Michael would be alone, there was a storm to come. Luke suppressed the urge to walk up to Michael and pull him into his arms. Instead, he balled his hands into fists. “But I can’t not be with you, either.”

Just as quickly as the storm had come, it vanished from Michael’s eyes, was replaced with the faintest hint of hope.

“What-” Michael’s voice was raspy as he tried to speak. He cleared his throat- “What does that mean?”

“It means that I love you. More than anything.” _Despite everything_ , Luke thought. “I love you.” Luke laughed, helplessly. Not because he felt helpless, but because he had been so helplessly in denial. “And I want to be with you. I always just want to be with you.”

Luke watched as the glimmer of hope in Michael’s eyes slowly but surely ignited his whole face. Michael’s smile was bright, so bright that Luke had to close his eyes as Michael bridged the distance between them. His mouth found Michael’s blindly as Michael pulled him in.

“I love you,” Michael pressed out as soon as they had broken for air, rendered breathless. “I love you so much. You’re everything to me, Luke.”

And Luke knew, as he met Michael’s eyes, why Troy had burned and why Michael had always compared their love to a natural phenomenon. Because Michael looked helpless, just as helpless as Luke felt. This was their nature. _Two fools helplessly in love._

Luke leaned forward and Michael kissed him back eagerly, tangled his hands in Luke’s hair, let his fingers glide down the nape of Luke’s neck and over his back, pushing them impossibly closer together.

“I promise you that I won’t make the same mistake twice. I’ll do everything to make it work this time.” Michael whispered almost fervently into his neck, as if he was scared Luke would vanish if he didn’t get the words out fast enough. “I won’t ever take you for granted again.”

“Never fade again.” Luke could feel his heart seize with long lost memories. “Never fade again, I won’t survive it a second time.”

“Never.” Michael pulled away just far enough so that he could cup Luke’s face in his hands. “I won’t let you down again. I’ll make this work, if it takes until I’m skin and bones.”

Luke nodded. He knew that Michael was serious. Music had always been Michael’s dream, despite all the complications that it had brought upon them. But Luke was Michael’s dream, too. And Michael would never forget that again.

Luke averted his eyes to the window for a second. There was one last thing he had to address. “I need to break up with Will.”

Michael’s gaze darkened infinitesimally before the harsh lines disappeared from his face. Gently, Michael disentangled his hand from where their hands had found each other and instead carded his fingers through Luke’s hair, brushed the blond strands matted against Luke’s forehead out his face.

“Hey, Lukey, it’s- it’s fine, okay? This is about you, and no one else. And if you need some time, we can keep this a secret for now until you have figured out how to end things with him. A big part of why he is in the picture in the first place is my fault. We’ll keep it under the wraps until you’ve figured out a way how to let him off easy, sound okay?”  

Luke inhaled deeply and then he nodded. “Yeah, I- … thank you.”

Michael smiled and pinched Luke’s chin between his fingers, pressing their lips together in a short but deep kiss. “Of course. Whatever you need. I love you.”

For the first time in a long time, Luke’s chest felt light as he reciprocated the smile on Michael’s face. “I love you too.”

“Good,” Michael grinned and pulled Luke closer again. “Now, please kiss me. I waited so long to call you mine again, all I really care for is kissing you right now.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slight homphobia tw (more in the end notes)

**“You’ve got his name on your arm  
** **His words on your knuckles”** **  
** **\- Knuckles // Moose Blood**

Luke awoke to lips pressing against his palm, teeth grazing the sensitive skin of his wrist before they disappeared. Slowly, he pried his eyes open, blinked against the harsh sunlight falling in through the window. It had to be at least noon. 

Luke lowered his gaze and watched where Michael was playing with his fingers, running his thumb over the soft flesh of Luke’s knuckles. Luke readjusted his face on the pillow they shared. He ignored the wince that threatened to escape his throat as the motion caused the sore muscles of his ass to sting. 

“Morning,” Luke rasped out and Michael’s eyes flicked up to him, a soft smile spreading over his features. Luke reciprocated the smile and leaned over, scratched his nails over the stubble on Michael’s jaw before pressing their lips together. 

“Sleep well?” Michael asked him as soon as Luke had let his head fall back onto the pillow. Michael’s fingertips were brushing up and down the bare skin of his arm and the sensation alone was enough to distract Luke for a couple of moments before he managed to nod. 

“You?”

“Good.” Luke savoured the soft edge to it, the calm in Michael’s eyes where a certain restlessness had been ever since he had come back. “Fucking great, actually,” Michael added with a grin. He pressed his lips to Luke’s one more time before he rolled himself out of bed and onto his feet. “Breakfast?” 

Luke was about to slink further back into the pillows, pull the duvet over his head when his stomach gave a loud growl. He sighed and took Michael’s extended hand, “I guess.”

Michael laughed as he pulled Luke out of bed and patted his shoulder sympathetically once Luke was standing in front of him. Luke used the opportunity to seize Michael’s arm and curl his hand around Michael’s nape, admire Michael’s face. 

Michael’s pale skin seemed almost luminous in the bright sunlight. His light eyes were gleaming, kiss-swollen lips pulled up into the hint of a smile. Michael watched in amusement as Luke studied him. His hair lay flat against his head except for a few strands at the back of his head that were sticking up. Luke smiled as he carded his hair through the few blue hair. It really did look like someone had slaughtered a smurf on Michael’s head. 

“I like your hair,” Luke whispered. 

Michael’s arms snaked around the small of his back, pushing their bare bodies flush together. 

“I like you,” Michael murmured against his temple before peppering the side of his face in kisses and Luke couldn’t help the warm, prickling sensation in his stomach, the overwhelming surge of love in his chest. He laughed, just because he was here and Michael was with him. Michael chimed in after a moment. Eventually and visibly reluctant, Michael let him go in favour of walking over to his dresser. Luke took to collecting his clothes from the ground.  

“Have you seen my underwear?” 

“If you found it, you probably wouldn’t want to wear it,” Michael remarked with a smirk before pulling open the top drawer of his dresser. “Here.” 

Luke was hit square in the face by a pair of grey boxers. After a moment of scrutiny, Luke realised that this pair of boxers actually belonged to him, or rather to his sixteen year-old self. 

“You kept all your clothes in this house?” 

Michael shrugged where he stood facing away from him, busy shimmying into a pair of black skinnies. “Sure. I always knew I’d come back here so it didn’t really make sense moving everything to my parents’ new place if I wasn’t going to live there anyways.” 

“Do you… you want to keep this house?” 

Michael turned around to look at him, his pierced brow raised. “Of course I’m going to keep this house. I mean I’ve got a room at Calum and Ashton’s place in LA, but that’s not my home. You’re my home. And you live here so I live here, too.” 

Luke fought hard against the burning sensation in his cheeks. 

“Well, until you’re going off to uni or whatever you had planned. Then we’ll have to look at apartments in the city, but until then…” Michael shrugged again and turned back around to retrieve a fresh pair of socks. Willing the butterflies in his stomach to cease, Luke bent down to fish his jeans from under Michael’s bed. 

There was music spilling into the hallway when Luke followed Michael down the stairs. It became louder the closer they got to the kitchen, some classic 80s rock song blaring from the kitchen radio. The moment they had entered the room they were greeted by a half-naked Ashton, dancing on the kitchen island clad in nothing but a ripped pair of black jeans and a bandana with baby carrots printed onto the fabric. Calum was watching Ashton, stood in front of the stove with one hand wrapped around the handle of a frying pan. The expression on his face lay somewhere between fond and the long set-in resignation of someone who spent most of his time around figurative five year-olds. Luke related, both to the desire for maturity, and the ocean deep adoration in Calum’s eyes for the lack thereof both Michael and Ashton seemed to share. 

“Luke!” Ashton cheered as he spotted the blond man peering over Michael’s shoulder. He dropped the spatula he had used as a microphone into the scrambled eggs Calum was making and hopped off the kitchen counter. Before long, Luke found himself wrapped up tightly into Ashton’s arms. Michael chuckled at the undignified noise Luke uttered and forewent any attempts at helping Luke in favour of making a beeline for the fridge. 

“How are you today, man?” 

“I’m good,” Luke replied to Ashton, still feeling a little bemused at the sudden onslaught of Ashton’s attention. “Little tired. Didn’t sleep that much.” 

Luke could see Michael’s smug expression as he ripped the lid off of a strawberry yoghurt and dumped its content straight into his mouth. Luke suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. 

“Yeah, we could hear that.” 

Ashton grinned at him, thoroughly unbothered, and continued to talk while Luke tried hard not to choke on his own embarrassment. In the background, Michael had moved on to peeling a banana and was suggestively waggling his eyebrows at Luke while he swallowed down half of it in one go.

“I am really glad you too worked things out, though,” Ashton was saying as Luke snapped his attention back to him. " You must know Michael talked about you so much, you can't even imagine. Really, he almost drove Cal and me crazy with all his whin-” 

“Ashton!” Michael came up from behind him, cutting the curly-haired man up by snaking his arm around Ashton’s neck, squeezing just a little too tight. “Let’s go into the living room, shall we? We’ve got some work to do, afterall.” 

“Work?” Luke asked, watching as Michael dragged Ashton out of the kitchen.

“The thing about the banding retreat wasn’t a lie. We are actually here to write our second album,” Michael informed him over his shoulder, grinningly, before he disappeared into the living room, Ashton struggling to free himself from the headlock Michael was keeping him in. 

Luke felt dark eyes boring his back before he turned around and met them. 

“Luke,” Calum acknowledged him, his hands working blindly to scoop scrambled eggs out of the pan and shovel them onto two plates. 

“Calum.” Luke mirrored Calum’s half-nod and swallowed.  

Calum sized him up for several more, long moments before he broke into the faintest hint of a smile. He picked up the two plates he had loaded with breakfast and pushed one of them into Luke’s chest as he surpassed him. 

“You can watch the jamming session if you like.” 

Luke couldn’t help the slight breath of relief as soon as Calum had left the room. Luke wasn’t scared of Calum. He knew what Calum was doing, knew why Calum was watching him just a tad too closely for comfort and treated him more coolly than Ashton. Calum had taken over the role of the sensible one. The one that worried while Ashton simply wasn’t the type and Michael was distracted. 

And Calum was definitely worrying about Luke. After all that Luke and Michael had went through, and the things Michael might have told him, Luke wasn’t all that surprised. Luke was glad even. If Calum was looking out for his band, that meant he was also looking out for Michael. Gingerly picking up the fork Calum had stabbed into the middle of Luke’s eggs, Luke shoved some of them into his mouth and made his way into the living room. 

  
  


**“Through all the hard times in my life** **  
** **Those nights kept me alive”** **  
** **\- Those Nights // Skillet**

“Ow, fuck, Luke!”

Luke knew not to look up from where he was bent over his Physics homework. It wasn’t him that was being called. He sat secluded from the rest of the people in the basement, his books sprawled out on the old coffee table Luke knew Jayden had scavenged from his grandma, too far away from anyone to have caused any offense. Out of the corner of his eye he could see one of Michael’s friends, who was coincidentally bearing the same name as him (“the other Luke” as Luke had dubbed him in his head,) lean himself over the drum kit that was set up on the carpet in the centre of the room. 

“Oh, don’t be such a baby, Josh.” 

“Fuck you, Rockets, I’ll show you who’s a baby.” 

“Guys, not on the drum kit! What the- Luke!” 

Luke looked up just in time to watch a tangle of three lanky teenage boys tumble to the ground. Josh was the first one back on his feet, returning to the stool of his drum kit much more gracefully than Luke would have ever thought to be possible for a lanky seventeen year-old. Still tangled in a heap on the ground, Jayden flapped around until he was straddling the other Luke beneath him, who promptly used the opportunity to lick his hand and wipe it over Jayden’s face. Over Jayden’s shoulder, Luke could see Inigo share a long suffering look with Michael where the both of them were sitting on stools a little off to the left, tuning their acoustic guitars. 

“Oi, get off of me, Rockets!” 

“You stop riding my dick, Seeley, and get your own, gay ass off of me yourself!” 

Luke felt the plastic cap of his pen squeak as his grip unintentionally tightened. Michael’s head snapped up, his gaze boring into both of his friends before he looked on to Luke. Luke quickly lowered his gaze back to his homework. He tried to focus on the formula on the paper in front of him, but the numbers and letters were blurring in front of his eyes. 

“Could you please-” Inigo interrupted the quarrel on the ground loudly. Luke could feel Inigo’s eyes on him, too- “stop being useless idiots and instead get your hands on your instruments. This is not going to go anywhere if you don’t start taking this seriously, so Luke get your ass over here. Mike and I’ve been waiting for over ten minutes now.”

Luke could hear scuffling and lowly muttered curses that were already becoming much more good-natured than heated as Jayden and the other Luke pulled themselves to their feet. 

Luke himself refused to look up. He could still feel Michael staring at him. Luke bit his lip, furrowed his brows in pretend concentration. It wasn’t until an unopened can of soda was held under his nose that he looked up. 

“Coke?” Jayden offered, taking a sip from his own can. He was speaking calmly. Jayden’s dark eyes were bright with rare timidity and Luke knew that Jayden had understood, too. 

He took the drink that was offered to him and laid his pencil down in favour of popping the metal lid. Jayden smiled, and rounded the table in between them so he could flop himself down next to Luke. How Jayden managed to squeezed his impossibly long legs beneath the coffee table was beyond Luke. 

“What’y’doin’?”

“Physics,” Luke muttered more lowly than he’d have liked to admit, because he was still a weeny sophomore talking to the senior friend of his boyfriend and Jayden intimidated him, as much as Luke knew he didn’t need to feel that way. It was just something that Jack had drilled into his mind.  _ Respect the older kids if you want to have an easy life.  _

“Respect.” Jayden smiled. “I was never really good at that stuff but Mike’s been telling me you won a price or something.” 

“I got second place at the Science fair this year,” Luke admitted. “It’s not that big of a deal,” he quickly added. 

“Well, Mike’s been bragging about you anyways.” Jayden grinned and then his expression turned solemn. “You know none of us have a problem with you two being together, yeah? Rockets is just an idiot and he didn’t think, didn’t even realise it probably. If he did, he’d be very sorry. He didn’t mean to offend.” 

Feeling a little bit overwhelmed, Luke nodded his head. He stalled for time by taking a sip from his coke. Then he said, “Yeah, I know. I swear I know. I’m not upset… I- I don’t mind. It’s all good. No biggie.” 

Luke plastered the biggest smile onto his face he could muster. Jayden searched his eyes for a moment before he nodded, the tension leaving his shoulders. “We do care about you, you know. Not just because you’re Mike’s boyfriend. And if anyone’s ever giving you trouble, you can tell any of us. Luke, especially, will gladly kick anyone’s ass for you.” 

Luke couldn’t help but laugh at that because he knew it to be true. “Yeah, I know. He told me that ‘no one gets to disrespect the name’ so I’m all set in that department.” After a moment, he added, “Thank you.” 

“No problem, man.” Jayden dimpled at him before his eyes lit up and he reached behind him, where he had leaned his bass guitar against the worn-out couch behind them. “You wanna learn how to play bass?” 

“Oh-”

“Jayden!” 

Luke couldn’t help the reflexive smile that spread over his face as he heard Michael’s voice, felt Michael appear in front of their table. 

“Are you trying to corrupt my boyfriend, Seeley?” Michael asked, his arms crossed in front of his chest, mischief bright in his green irides. Michael’s eyes met Luke’s for a split second and Luke felt the hidden concern fade from Michael’s face as Luke smiled at him earnestly. “With a  _ bass guitar _ ?” 

“I mean…” Jayden grinned, his eyes widening deviously. “It’s the superior instrument?” 

Michael scoffed, but before he could get a word out, Josh appeared on Jayden’s side. “Bullshit, the two of you. If Hemmings is going to learn anything, it’s drums. Come with me, Luke, let me show you the real deal.” 

“Shut your trap, Brozzesi.” 

“You can kiss my snare drum, Clifford.” 

Before Luke knew it, he was watching Michael, Josh and Jayden argue over his head. Lured in like sharks by blood, it didn’t take long for the other Luke and Inigo to join the banter. They bounced their arguments and impressive array of curse words back and forth until eventually, Jayden announced a jam off and soon after Luke found himself sitting down Indian style on the carpet in front of the drum kit, Michael settling down behind him, his legs bracketing Luke’s own. Inigo, ready to represent the guitar section, sat down next to them, while Josh took his place behind the drumkit and Jayden and the other Luke closed the circle. 

Luke listened to Michael’s friends play their respective instruments with admiration. They were good, all of them. Not as good as Michael, no one would ever be as talented as Michael in Luke’s book, but Michael’s friends came close. It was obvious that they had a blast while playing and they did so with confidence. 

Luke let his head fall back onto Michael’s shoulder, smiled as he felt Michael’s lips pressing into his hair. Luke took a sip of his coke and enjoyed just being in the moment, surrounded by people that cared about him and Michael’s arms wrapped around his waist.    
  


**“And all the times I came to you but never ever lied  
** **Show me that phone in your pocket”  
** **\- In Your Pocket // Maroon 5**

Luke flopped himself down onto the loveseat in the living room and watched as Michael and his bandmates grabbed their instruments. Ashton, who Luke knew was their drummer, settled down on a cajon, though Luke could see the separated parts of a drum set lined up against the far wall, right below the TV. 

Michael smiled at him before he let himself fall into the arm chair opposite of him and turned his attention to his bandmates. Luke didn’t mind being cast aside for the moment. Michael was a professional when he was working, completely focussed on the music at all times. 

“Cal, can you play that bass line again that we had the other day? The one for track five?”

Calum started plucking the strings of his bass, a crease appearing between his brows. 

“Yeah that…” Michael started humming along to the tune, his fingers moving over the fret of his guitar seemingly on their own. Luke was amazed how easily they harmonised. He had witnessed it at the bonfire jamming session already, but it hadn’t become any less impressive. Shovelling heaps of scrambled egg into his mouth, Luke watched their songwriting session progress. 

“... even wide awake or … what did we say? Sleeping? Even wide awake or sleeping? I don’t know, that’s weak, that’s not really it.”

“Dreaming?” Ashton suggested. 

Michael beamed at him, adjusted his fingers on the fret and played the chord progression again. After a couple of times, Calum joined in and then Ashton also. Luke watched them get through the whole song this way, adding and replacing bits and pieces here and there until they had composed and written an entire song. The end result was stunning, and left Luke with a simmering ache in his chest. 

Luke waited until eventually Michael called for a five minute break before he followed Michael into the kitchen to fetch some water.

“Oh, Luke.” Michael chimed happily when he noticed Luke standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “Help me out?” 

“Yeah, sure.” Luke bridged the distance between them but forewent the water bottles Michael had lined up on the kitchen counter in favour of crowding Michael back against the fridge. Michael let himself fall back against the fridge door eagerly and pulled Luke in. 

“Hi,” Michael smiled against Luke’s lips before pressing his own against them. Luke cupped Michael’s face in his hands as he deepened their kiss. Then he let his head drop to the crook of Michael’s neck. Luke could feel Michael’s nose in his hair, the other man’s fingertips roaming up and down his arms. It was a feeling of being at ease that Luke only realised he had missed so direly now that he had it back and it made the ache in his chest worse. 

“That song…” Luke pressed out eventually and lifted his head to meet Michael’s eyes. 

Michael smiled at him and Luke swallowed. “It’s beautiful and also… I know you write songs about how you feel and… the lyrics… is that how you… feel?” 

Michael’s smile turned dark, but all the more adoring. 

“I had a couple of bad months. Well, a year and four months.” Michael shrugged and intertwined their fingers. When he looked up again, there was no trace of sorrow left on his face. “But that’s in the past now. Besides, it’s not just me. Ash and Cal, especially, are in it just as much as me. So don’t worry about it, okay? I’m happy. I’m very happy right now.” 

“I love you,” Luke replied, simply because it was the most important thing he had to say. 

Michael’s expression brightened indefinitely and he squeezed where their hands were intertwined. “I love  _ you.  _ Also,” Michael’s smile turned wicked, “I really need to take a leak, so uhm.” 

Luke snorted but took a step back. He let out an indignant squeak when Michael slapped his ass as he took a step around him. With a low, but undeniably happy sigh, Luke picked up the water bottles from the kitchen counter. He was still shaking his head, making his way back into the living room, when a low string of curses made him falter in his step. He had never heard Ashton sound that distressed before. 

“What happened?” inquired Calum’s voice not a split second later. 

Luke inched towards the open doorway that separated kitchen and living room. Carefully, he peered around the corner and found Calum towering over where Ashton was still sitting on his cajon, phone in hand. He turned it around, showing the screen to Calum. 

Calum’s expression darkened as he took a step back. “Ashton,” he said in a manner that Luke could only describe as a mixture of angry, disappointed and - for some undecipherable reason - fearsome. 

“I swear, I didn’t do it on purpose. It was an accident!” 

“Ashton,” Calum repeated, growled really, the anger in his eyes taking over. “Fuck. You…are you kidding me? Fuck! You have to tell Michael. Now!” 

Ashton shook his head so harshly that a considerable amount of curls sprung free from the bandana, his fingers tapping away on his screen almost frantically. As soon as he seemed done, Ashton tilted the screen back to Calum. “Please, Cal. See, I already deleted it. It doesn’t even have to mean anything. No one has noticed, probably. Please.” 

“Ashton, if you don’t tell Michael, I will. He has to know about this.” 

“No, please, Cal. You can’t tell Michael. He’ll freak out. Especially right now!” 

“Ashton…”

“Please, Calum…” Luke watched as Ashton slid his phone into his back pocket, carefully out of Calum’s reach, before he grabbed the other man’s hands into his own. They stared at each other for several, long and intense moments before - much to Luke’s surprise - Calum seemed to yield. 

“Okay, we’ll see if anything comes out of it, but if it does- I swear to god, Ash.” 

It was the sound of the guest toilet flushing that made Luke perk up. Hastily, Luke took a big step back into the kitchen and made sure to loudly bang a couple of cabinet doors before he walked into the living room for good this time. 

Ashton and Calum were both playing around on their instruments when Luke returned to their small set up. 

“Thanks, Luke!” Ashton beamed at him, no hint of distress in his face as he took the water bottle Luke offered him.

Calum took his bottle silently, but he, too, seemed completely at ease as he unscrewed the lid of his bottle and gulped the majority of the water down in one go. 

Luke folded his long legs underneath him as he made himself comfortable on the loveseat. Pressing the cold ridges of his own bottle against the side of his face, Luke forced a smile onto his face when Michael returned. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a snide remark is made that accidentally uses the word gay as an insult. if you are not comfortable with that you can skip this chapter's past introduced by Skillet lyrics and jump straight to the second part of this chapter's present introduced by Maroon 5 lyrics. 
> 
> for a summary of the past, leave a comment and I'll post it as a reply. stay safe!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Boys touching other boys.

**“All my stones become your pearls  
** **All of my trials are your treasures”** **  
** **\- Mine Is Yours // Cold War Kids**

Luke was sitting at his desk, scrolling on his laptop when the gravel hit his window. With a sigh, he got up and traipsed over to the window, pushing the pane up. Once the window was open, Luke flopped himself back down onto his desk chair. He spent the time Michael needed to climb through his window rubbing his eyes. They hurt after he had spent the last few hours staring at his laptop screen in the darkness of his bedroom.

“You know, you didn’t have to come through the window,” Luke mumbled as soon as Michael had hoisted himself over the window sill.

“Well, I couldn’t exactly go through the front door,” Michael paused momentarily, “if your brother is here.”  

“Celeste came yesterday so they went out with Mum and Dad for dinner.”

“Ah, okay. Budge over?”

Averting his eyes back to his laptop screen, Luke moved until he was perched on the edge of his chair. Michael settled in behind him with a low “oof” and a muttered “was easier when we were kids.” Luke chuckled. Sharing a chair had definitely been easier when they both had been half the sizes they were now, but they made do. Even though Luke ended up half in Michael’s lap.

Luke couldn’t help the grateful sigh that escaped him when Michael wrapped his arms around him from behind. He hadn’t even noticed how cold it had been in his room until he was enveloped by Michael’s warmth.

Michael hooked his head over Luke’s shoulder a moment later. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Looking at universities.” Michael’s hair tickled his temple as Luke scrolled up to let Michael see the beginning of the page. “I talked to Dad and he said he doesn’t need me to stay here for another year. Both Mum and Dad want me to go so I’m looking into it. There’s a couple unis here in Sydney that I’m interested in. See? I like this one because they’re Science program is really good, but it’s a private department so their fees are…”  

Luke bit his lip before the longing and disappointment swirling in his gut could unfold fully. Instead, he moved on to the next school. “This one’s pretty good as well. They had a guest lecture with John Craig Venter once and their fees are reasonable.”

“Luke...”

“Look here, I made a chart with all of the money I earned in the year since I’ve graduated and the payment plan they had on the website and if I like … not eat for the first three months I should be fine.”

“Luke.” It was the tone of voice Michael used that made Luke wriggle around until he could meet Michael’s eyes. Luke furrowed his brows.

“What?”The softness to Michael’s eyes made Luke glower.

Michael sized him up for a moment, licked his lips before he asked, “How much is the first school?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said slowly, “what you’re trying to insinuate, Michael, but I advise you right now to stop.”

Immediately, Michael dropped his fake innocent behaviour and let out a long-suffering sigh. “Oh, c’mon, Luke.”

“Nu-uh.”

Michael glared right back at him, fond making the corners of his eyes crinkle treacherously and Luke wanted to throttle him or kiss him or both at once. That was, the longer Luke thought about it, the default emotion Michael provoked in him, really.

“Do you not love me?”

“What?” On a second thought, Luke figured, the urge to throttle Michael won any day. “That has nothing to do with this, Michael! I’m not going to let you pay for my tuition. I’m capable myself, thank you.”

“I’m just saying,” Michael continued talking, just raised his voice and tightened his grip around him when Luke tried to protest, “that you love me, right?”

“Right,” Luke admitted through gritted teeth.

Michael beamed at him. “As I love you. And that’s not going to change any time soon, right?”

“I recall,” Luke sighed, “something about our love being tied to a perpetually reiterating state of the weather, or whatever.”

“Reiterating, _nice_ ,” Michael complimented under his breath before he continued his actual speech. “What I’m trying to say is that this is your future. And because we’re forever, it’s also my future. So if I want to invest-”

“ _‘Invest’,_ ” Luke scoffed. He just so refrained from making air quotation marks. “That sounds so fucking-”

“Luke Hemmings, would you shut up for a damn second?” Michael roared suddenly, painfully loudly as Luke was still situated in his lap. Luke snapped his mouth shut, watched Michael with wide eyes. “Don’t think I’m stupid because I’m not, okay? I recognise the name of that first uni because I remember you telling me about it on skype before the- I know that uni. And if it’s your dream university then honestly fuck Luke, tell me whatever number and I’ll pay it. You deserve your dream and fuck the money. Everyone else got it from me, even your dad and-”

“Wait, what has my dad to do with any of this?”

“- and I can do it now, _easily_ even, so please let me. Will you let me do this one thing for you?”

Luke searched Michael’s eyes for a long moment, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Michael’s eyes were bright as he waited for a reply, his shoulders heaving lightly.

“No.” Luke shook his head lightly. “No, Michael. That’s way too much. ”

“Fine,” Michael gave in, accepting Luke’s decision. Or so Luke thought, until he saw the glint of mischief reappear in Michael’s eyes. “We’ll postpone the discussion.”

“You’re insufferable,” Luke growled and wriggled back around until he was facing his laptop screen again.

He could feel Michael exhale against his nape before Michael dumped his head onto his shoulder. Luke opened a new browser tab and typed in the name of another university he had noted down in his To Look At column while Michael busied himself with splaying his fingers out on Luke’s stomach, drawing patterns into the thick fabric of Luke’s sweatshirt. For several moments, the air was filled with nothing but the sound of Luke’s fingers moving over the keyboard.

And then, “Or I just prepone our wedding.”

Luke went rigid, his thumb smashing down on the space bar so hard he was sure he’d need a crowbar to get it unstuck. “Michael,” Luke breathed out heavily.

“Think about it, Luke, once we’re married, this whole money bullshit becomes a non-issue anyways. Remember when we talked about that, Lukey? We talked about what colour our suits would have so that they would set us apart as the grooms. We settled on cobalt blue, remember that?”

“No- I mean yes I remember. Of course, I remember. But we’re not gonna get married right now, Michael.”

“True, you have to get rid off the other one first.”

There went Luke’s enter key. Luke pressed his lips into a tight line and carefully pried his fingers off of his keyboard before balled his hands into fists in his lap.

“I’m sorry,” Michael’s voice was soft, filled with genuine remorse, as he spoke up once he realised Luke wouldn’t. “Please, don’t be mad.”

Luke ignored the shudder that went through his whole body as Michael pecked the back of his neck in silent apology. He sighed. “Don’t talk about him like that, please. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“He stole my boyfriend,” Michael gave back without hesitation. “That’s a pretty big wrong in my book. But,” Michael rested his chin back on Luke’s shoulder, “I already acknowledged that that’s kinda my fault. So I’m sorry. Please, don’t look so sad, Luke. I swear, I’ll be good from now on if you smile again.”

“You’ll never be good, Michael.”

“That’s also true.” Michael squirmed around until he had pushed Luke off the chair, pulled them both to their feet. Once he stood facing Luke, he pulled him close by the strings of his sweatshirt. Michael grinned, his mouth millimetres from Luke’s. “But I have you, so I’m fine.”

Luke reciprocated the close-mouthed kiss Michael pulled him into, slid his fingers into the soft strands at the back of Michael’s head. Michael quickly deepened the kiss, nudged Luke’s mouth open with his tongue. Luke let him, focussed on the electric feel of Michael’s fingers grazing his stomach as he curled them around Luke’s belt.

“I’ll do it soon,” Luke mumbled when Michael pulled away to attach his lips to Luke’s neck, pressing a single, open-mouthed kiss to the sensitive skin below Luke’s ear. Michael’s fingers made quick work of Luke’s belt buckle. “I’m gonna ask him over for dinner on Friday and then tell him.”

“Whatever way you think is best. I have you, so I’m fine”

Michael let himself fall to his knees and Luke couldn’t help the hitch of his breath as Michael pushed up his sweatshirt to pepper kisses on Luke’s skin along his waistband. Holding the fabric up with one hand, Michael used his other to push Luke’s jeans and boxers down to his knees. Luke hissed as his cock sprung free, cold air against his hot flesh making him shiver.

Michael looked up at him. His pupils were dilated, the green in his irides reduced to barely visible rings. Luke couldn’t help the smile that tugged on the corners of his mouth as Michael grinned at him, adoring, always adoring, despite the position they were in. That was, Luke thought, what made him unable to do this with anyone else but Michael. There was always love in the way Michael fucked him, however Michael fucked him. Luke didn’t think he could ever allow anyone else to see him like this, so weak, so completely at mercy.

“You have me,” Luke managed before he lost all ability of speech to Michael’s fingers gripping his hip and the tight, wet heat of Michael’s mouth around his cock.

 

 **“And I came round and blew smoke from my mouth** ****  
**I thought I saw you in the clouds”** **  
** **\- Honey // Moose Blood**

Philospohy, Luke had decided, was definitely the worst subject ever invented. He had taken the class mainly because Ian’s family were atheists and Luke’s friend was hence forbidden to attend any of the religion classes. A friendly sacrifice that Luke had come to regret in the first five minutes of his first class already, and that had grown only deeper roots ever since. Luke couldn’t have cared less about the workings of the world. He hadn’t even figured out the workings of the cafeteria yet and Luke had been in high school for two years already.

To add to the “unbearable mindfuck” as Paul liked to call their class, their teacher was a nightmare. Luke had overheard some of the girls to his right make bets on Mrs Gibbins age. A redhead named Lucy was closest, in Luke’s opinion, with the estimate guess of 117. Luke himself thought Mrs Gibbins to be about 120. Her plaid-patterned culotte skirt and inconsistently beige turtle neck, as the girls and Luke agreed, was that age in any case. Luke was thankful that the girls had sat down next to him. He was alone today as Ian had texted him in the morning that he was staying home with pink eye. The girls offered at least some mild form of entertainment while Mrs Gibbins in the front droned on and on about dead Greek people.

Just when Luke began to ponder whether it was possibly to die of boredom-induced respiratory failure, a shrill, ear-splitting tone began to sound from the hallway. Luke watched Phelin Jackson land head-first on his desk as the alarm made him jerk awake where he had fallen asleep on a stack of books, and Mrs Gibbins halted in her endless litany in shock.

“Fire alarm!” Lucy to Luke’s left shrieked out a second later and bolted towards the door.

In the ensuing chaos, Luke tried hard not to get trampeled.

Unfortunately, Luke was pretty scrawny for a seventeen year-old, not exactly the rock-in-the-sea-kind of guy. It only got worse when he got onto the hallway. There were students everywhere, pushing and shoving, elbowing their way to the only stairwell of their floor. Luke had hated Philosophy class on the third floor out of principal, but now he was seriously loathing it. If Mrs Gibbins’ voice was to be the last thing in his life he had experienced before being swallowed by flames, Luke was going to come back a ghost and haunt the school _out of principle._

Luke had made it down a flight of stairs onto the second floor when he spotted a shock of bright pink hair in the crowd and nearly cried out in relief.

“Michael!” he called out and tried hard not to be taken under by a wave of seniors pushing past him in pursuit of the stair well.

“Luke!”

Right before Luke was waltzed over by another wave of panicked teenagers, he felt a tight hand wrap around his upper arm and then Luke was pulled to the side, into the entryway of one of the class rooms. Luke felt his body relax instantly at the smell of girl shampoo mixed with Michael’s deodorant.

“Ah, help!” Luke uselessly wagged his arms, nearly fell onto his arse as Michael’s solid form behind him yielded all of a sudden and then Luke found himself inside the classroom in whose entry way they had taken cover. As soon as Michael had pulled Luke back onto his feet where he had slipped his hands underneath Luke’s armpits from behind, Luke jerked around.

Michael wrapped a hand back around Luke’s arm as if he sensed Luke’s attempt to make a beeline for the door a second later.

“What are you doing, Michael, the fire alarm- we have to get out!” Luke struggled to free himself and drag Michael towards the door with him at the same time.

“Shh, Luke.” Michael tightened his grip and grinned. It was the glint of mischief in his eyes that made Luke halt in his movement.

“Oh no.” Luke whispered, prayed as realisation settled in.

“Calm down, Lukey!” Michael patted invisible dust from Luke’s shoulders as he grinned. “It was me who pulled the fire alarm. There’s no actual fire.”

Luke shook his head in disbelief for a moment before he felt his shoulders deflate. He averted his eyes from Michael’s smug face in order to pinch the bridge of his nose, crossing his arm in front of his chest.

“Unbelievable,” Luke muttered as watched Michael surpass him and hop onto the teacher’s desk, swinging his legs without a care in the world. Luke went reluctantly as Michael beckoned him closer.

“Ah, c’mon, you should be grateful. I know you had old Mrs Gibbins. She’s so boring, I’m amazed she hasn’t lulled herself to sleep yet during one of her classes.”

“What is it then?” Luke asked and fought hard against the pleasant feeling coiling in his stomach as Michael hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of Luke’s jeans, pulled him in between his legs. It was made significantly easier by the incessant alarm that was still sounding overhead.

Michael grinned and freed one of his hands to let it disappear between his back pocket. Luke opened his hand and Michael dropped a crumpled up piece of paper into it.

“What’s that?” Luke asked and squinted at the paper. A majority of the paper was frayed as if Michael had folded the paper over and over and frayed out the edges in the process, but Luke recognised the general built-up of a web page. “Name, age, location… Michael, you didn’t sign up for a sex chat website, did you? Because honestly, as your boyfriend, I don’t know if I’d be that comfortable with that.”

“No, idiot.” Michael rolled his eyes at him and for the first time Luke noticed the slightly nervous twitch to Michael’s smile. “Here, see this text at the top? That’s it.”

“ _You’re an aspiring, male 16-19 year old musician? Douce Entertainment wants you! Fill out the form below to enter our casting call for a chance at the rockstar life! (Note: All video uploads must be formatted mp4 or avi),_ ” Luke read out loud, and then snapped his head up when he realised what he had just said. “You entered a casting call?”

“They wrote to me first,” Michael beamed at him. “Their PR person or whatever send me an email that they had found one of the covers I posted onto YouTube. They asked me to apply, Lukey!”

“That’s… awesome!” Luke felt giddy excitement spread throughout his stomach. “Did you apply already?”

Michael nodded. “This morning! I have to see if they get back at me, of course, but Luke if they do…” Michael took his hands, squeezing them a bit too hard but Luke didn’t care, couldn’t care.

“They will,” Luke said determinedly. “They have to. Oh wow, Michael!”

For a moment, they just beamed at each other and then Michael was hugging him, nearly causing them both to topple over. Luke didn’t mind, felt himself reverberate with every bit of excitement that Michael was oozing.

“I’m gonna be famous, Lukey!” Michael scream-whispered into his hair and Luke couldn’t help but laugh.

“Famous like blink one eighty-two,” Luke lilted.

“Even bigger than that,” Michael boasted and Luke shook his head before they both dissolved into laughter. The crumpled paper in Luke’s hand teared.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Boys touching other boys. The very awkward first time version.

**“What a dream I had pressed in organdy  
** **Clothed in crinoline of smoky burgundy”  
** **\- For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her // Simon & Garfunkel**

Luke checked up on his hair for the seventh time that evening. It took a lot of his self-control to not empty out the remaining half of his mother’s hairspray bottle. But his quiff was already as solid as concrete and Luke feared if he put any more into it, the blond strands might’ve broken off. So he forced himself to put the bottle away, hide it in the cabinet under the washing basin and leave the guest bathroom. Making sure the jumper he had put on over his dress shirt was without wrinkles, Luke entered the kitchen and checked up on his pots instead.

Luke didn’t normally cook but when he had invited Will over for dinner during their morning shift, Luke had known take-out wouldn’t do. Will deserved better than that, and Luke figured that if he was going to break up with Will tonight, the other man should at least get a nice meal out of it. So Luke had spent the majority of his afternoon in their local Coles, trying to find the ingredients for the menu he had found online. Michael had accompanied him and Luke smiled a little at the memory of Michael’s running commentary on all the “rabbit food” Luke had shopped for.

With a sigh, Luke turned to stirring the sauce he was cooking, whisking it like his mother had taught him to before his parents had fled the house for the evening. It was by the time that Luke was heaving the roast out of the oven that the doorbell rang. Quickly, Luke pulled the oven mittens he was wearing off of his hands with his teeth and hurried to open the front door. Luke was greeted by a bundle of deep magenta flowers, Will smiling at him from behind the bouquet.

“You brought me flowers,” Luke squeaked.

“Red camellia.” Will’s smile deepened as he lowered the bouquet in order to press a chaste kiss to Luke’s lips. “Seemed appropriate to me.”

“That’s-” Luke couldn’t help the stuttering of his heart- “That’s very nice of you.” He smiled up at Will and accepted the flowers. “Thank you.”

“Look up the meaning some time.”

Will winked at him and then surpassed him in order to enter the house. Luke took a moment to stroke over the soft petals of the flowers before he quickly closed the front door and hurried after Will.

“Smells delicious.”

Luke walked into the kitchen to find Will bent over the pots on the oven, lifting one of them just as water started to bubble over the rim.

“Oh, shit, it’s overboiling, here let me-”

“I got it!” Will snatched up a kitchen towel and began mopping up the spilt water, simultaneously turning down the heat of the plate. “I got it, it’s all good. You can go looking for a vase, I can take over.”

“No,” Luke protested. “I invited you, you shouldn’t-”

“Honestly, Luke,” Will shot him a calming smile, “it’s fine. Let me do something, too.”

“Okay,” Luke relented after a moment, taking a step back. “I’ll go put these into water, then.”

“Perfect.”

Will diverted his attention back to the pots in front of him and Luke took a step back, walked into the living room to roam through his mother’s porcelain cabinet. Luke reminded himself to breathe normally before he returned to the kitchen, not before having put the flowers on the table he had already set.

Once they had settled down for dinner, Luke felt himself ease up a little bit. Will carried the conversation easily and Luke found that he could resort to just nodding at the right moments.

“Mhm,” Will hummed eventually, both their plates cleared. Will dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin, “this is really delicous. You’re a good cook, Luke.”

“Thank you, I had help from a really talented sous-chef.”

Will beamed at him and Luke thought, feeling a pull in his chest, that he would miss him. He would miss Will, and the easy way they worked together. As opposed to what his brother thought, Luke hadn’t begun dating the other man because Will had been one of the few openly gay guys around, though that had definitely factored into it.

No, him and Will had clicked instantly when Will had started working at the coffee shop around the same time Luke had graduated. They had become good friends long before they had started dating. Will had listened to him, had been a source of consolation when Luke had needed it most and despite the fact that Will would hate him after this night, a part of Luke hoped for him to stay a part of Luke’s life. But Luke knew that Will most probably wouldn’t, and Luke had no right to ask him to. It was time.

“So,” Luke worried his lip between his lips for a moment before he released it. “There’s actually a reason for all of this.” Luke gestured to the table between them. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

Will looked at him for a moment before he nodded, folded his napkin on his lap. Luke was about to speak up when Will suddenly grinned at him. “Actually, can I go first?”

“Uh.” Luke blinked. “I mean sure?”

“Great.” There was excitement written all over Will’s face as he lifted his torso up far enough so he could push his chair back and stand up. “I’ll be right back, just a second.”

Will hurried out of the room and left Luke in cold sweat. A couple of moments later, Will returned, his coat in hand. Luke’s heart hammered against his chest as Will’s hand disappeared into the inside of his chest pocket and then Will was discarding the coat on his chair in favour of rounding the table and coming to a halt in front of Luke.

“Here, look at this.” Will handed him the slip of paper he had received and with curious eyes Luke unfolded the paper to scan the script on it. The first thing Luke noticed was the sigil on top of the paper.

Incredulously, Luke looked up at the other man, “St. Vincent’s? You got the pre-med scholarship?”

“I got it!” Will cheered and Luke felt his heart seize with excitement. Buzzing with unreleased joy, Luke jumped up and jumped into Will’s waiting arms.

“Oh my god,” Luke wheezed out, couldn’t help the laughter that was bubbling out of him. “This is amazing, this is- I can’t believe you got it! I am so so proud of you!” Luke pulled away to mimic a worshipping gesture. “All behold Will Compton, Australia’s most renowned brain surgeon. Well, in the future anyways.”

“Oh, Luke, please.”

Luke could tell Will was blushing, despite the dark tone of his skin. For a moment they just smiled at each other, exhilaration making the both of them shake with excitement. Then Will’s expression changed into something softer, and Will was taking his hand.  

“The scholarship covers almost everything except housing fees. I put in the first payment placement this morning. I’m starting this fall and I’m going to have to move into the city,” Will inhaled, “and I want you to come with me, Luke.”

Will smiled at him and Luke felt his heart stop. Because he could see it. He could see their life together, moving out and into the big city. How they would go apartment hunting and buy furniture and decorations and argue over what colour their soap spender should have.

“That sounds amazing.” Luke swallowed. He wouldn’t be able to break up with Will tonight. He couldn’t take that dream away from Will yet, couldn’t ruin this day for him. Luke forced a smile onto his face and Will beamed at him, pulled him in to press their lips together.

“I love you.” Will whispered into his ear and then laughed as he pulled Luke back into his arms, swayed them from side to side. As soon as he pulled away, Will asked, “By the way, what was it that you wanted to tell me?”

“Oh.” Luke felt his throat close up momentarily before he shook his head. He waved Will off. “Forget it. Nothing of importance.” Luke amped his smile up a couple of watt. “I’ve got tiramisu in the fridge for dessert. Let’s celebrate!”

“Terrific.” Squeezing Luke’s shoulder one last time, Will returned to his chair.

Luke kept his smile up until he entered the kitchen, then he let himself fall against the fridge door. He was in dire need of a new plan.

  


**“All the world I feel is ours  
** **I'll never let you reminisce of me”  
** **\- Carving Flowers // Avion Roe**

Luke shifted until he was lying on the edge of Michael’s mattress, his back pressed against the wall. The raw brick wall of Michael’s room was cold against his bare skin. Some time during the afternoon Luke had lost his shirt and jeans, but that was okay because he had found great joy in reciprocating the favour and ridding Michael of most of his clothes in return.

“Alright, you can come back.” Michael held up the duvet for Luke, which he had been adamant about shaking out. Luke hadn’t really seen any sense in it, but then Michael was much more experienced with spending an entire day in bed than him. Pliantly, Luke rolled himself once over and snuggled into the warmth of the blanket and Michael’s skin.

Luke thought that he had had to have grown tired, after spending hours and hours roaming his hands over Michael’s body, kissing every inch of skin that he could reach, overdosing on the taste of Michael’s tongue. But Luke didn’t, hadn’t really expected himself to in the first place. Luke had figured out a long time ago that it was impossible to grow tired of something that was so much a part of himself.

Though, for the first time in his life, Luke almost wished he could. If the yearning in his chest for Michael would only recede for some time, until the next day, then it wouldn’t hurt so much when Michael would leave. Involuntarily, Luke’s eyes wandered to the large duffel bag, backpack and guitar case that were lined up in front of the foot end of Michael’s bed.

“Stop thinking about tomorrow,” Michael reprimanded him, detaching his mouth from Luke’s neck. Luke flicked his eyes over to him guiltily. Michael’s gaze became intense, the smile on his face as menacing as it was loving. “Focus on me now.”

Luke tried to smile, and resolved into a fit of laughter when Michael attacked him, peppered his face in kisses before he blew a raspberry into the crook of Luke’s shoulder that left Luke gasping for air.

“There. I like you better when you smile.”

Luke rolled his eyes and pushed Michael off of him, ignoring the burning of his own cheeks as he directed his gaze anywhere but Michael’s smug face. Luke’s eyes landed on the receiver display below Michael’s TV.

Lightly, Luke shook his head. “I can’t believe we spend the whole day in bed. And I skipped school, too.”

Michael stretched where he had sprawled himself out next to Luke before he rolled himself onto his side, rested his head on his hand. The expression on his face held nothing but pride and mischief. “Doesn’t it feel good?”

“Being with you feels good. But I definitely have to catch up on all that I’ve missed.” Luke furrowed his brows. “Maybe I can ask Ian for his Maths notes, I’m sure if I offer to revise Philo with him he’ll say yes. Oh no, but then I have to get notes from Philo first what-”

Luke was cut off mid sentence by Michael, who uttered a loud groan and clamped his hand down on Luke’s mouth.

“Shush, no more school talk.”

“But-”

“You should drop out too.” Michael smiled against his shoulder, lightly biting down on the flesh. “And come with me.”

Luke let out a snort, but placed his hand over Michael’s where Michael was toying with the waistband of Luke’s boxer shorts.

“And what would I do in LA? Wait in your bed while you’re at the camp?”

“Sounds good to me,” Michael grinned at him, but then his expression turned soft. Michael’s eyes became dark with sadness and Luke struggled to keep his own smile on his face.

“I’ll miss you so much.” Michael whispered and pressed their lips together properly. Michael kissed him harshly, rolled himself back on top of Luke. The intensity of it all left Luke feeling a little dizzy.

Nonetheless he managed to say, “You have me. And it’s your dream. You have to go and chase it.”   
“My lover,” Michael whispered lowly, smiling at his own cheesiness. It was raw, honest and Luke knew that he was the only person in the world that Michael allowed to be seen by like that.  It was overwhelming and everything Luke needed.

“Send me pictures,” Luke joked, laughed because laughing was easier than thinking of the terrifying, deep abyss that was about to split his chest open. He would bear that pain, though. Luke would have endured anything to see Michael become what he had always wanted to be. And Michael was going to become a rockstar.

Instead of an answer, Michael just smothered him, smothered Luke in bruising kisses and nails raking over the skin of Luke’s lower stomach and thighs. Luke couldn’t have the described the way Michael’s hands and mouth on his body made him feel. His breathing became more ragged, Michael’s hands on his hips making him squirm.

“Please, please, Michael.”

“Tell me what you want.”

“I want… I want....” Luke couldn’t find any form of coherent thought with Michael’s lips placing open-mouthed kisses along his clavicle, Michael’s hand finally breaching the waistband of his pants, so Luke blurted out the one word he could think of. “... everything.”

Michael stilled above him the exact moment Luke registered how that sounded. Michael pulled away, not very far, but far enough for Luke to see the concern in his eyes, and below that _want._ “Do you mean?”

Luke swallowed. He didn’t know why he felt nervous all of a sudden. They had talked about this often, ever since they had started fooling around. But it always had been just that, fooling around. Blow jobs and jerking each other off under the blanket. Luke could vividly remember the first time Michael had put his mouth on Luke’s cock and Luke had come so fast they had both been taken by surprise. But having Michael’s mouth and fingers on him was something else than having Michael _like that._ Yet Luke couldn’t help the swirling sensation of heat in his lower belly at the thought. Luke wanted Michael like that. Luke wanted Michael that close, inseparable.

“I want you to sleep with me.” Luke’s heart was hammering against his rib cage.” O-only if you want that too of course.”

Michael stared at him for a long moment, so many emotions washing over his face that Luke failed to decipher a single one. In the end, he clung to the everlasting love in Michael’s eyes that seemed to prevail, became unbearably intense as Michael nodded, slowly but unmistakably.

“Yeah,” Michael breathed out and then he was moving, shifting on top of Luke until he could reach the top drawer of his bedside table that Luke knew Michael kept a bottle of lube and a sealed box of condoms in. Once he had retrieved both of the items, Michael sat up. When Michael stopped moving, Luke took the bottle of lube from his hands.

“I can open myself up if you want. I’ve done it before.”

“No, want to do it for you.” A tiny, warm smile appeared on Michael’s face and Luke couldn’t help the breath of relief that escaped him. They were in this together. “Lay back for me?”

Luke complied, spread his legs so Michael could settle in between them. Luke watched Michael pop the cap of the lube bottle open, squeeze a generous amount of the clear liquid into his fingers, so much that some of it dripped onto his thighs. Luke pretended not to notice the slight quiver to Michael’s hands. It reassured Luke, the knowledge that Michael was just as nervous as he felt.

“Are you- are you sure you wanna do this?” Michael asked him while he rubbed his fingers together. “Because we don’t have to- if you don’t want to, Luke-”

Before Michael could ramble on any further, Luke had sat up in order to pull Michael down on top of him, slot their mouths together. He kissed Michael long and deep before he let him go.

“Need your fingers in me,” Luke mumbled against Michael’s lips before he let him go fully, “please.”

Looking positively dazed, Michael nodded. His pupils were dilated, and Luke found that certain air of confidence return to Michael’s posture. Michael, too, had realised that this was just them. They were going to be okay.

Lowering his head to Luke’s neck, Michael pushed Luke’s pants down and pressed his finger against the tight hole, pushing a single digit in. Involuntarily, Luke sucked in a breath, but he motioned Michael to go on before the other boy could call the whole thing off.

“I’m fine- fine.” It was fine. They had gotten this far before.

Michael began to suck harshly on Luke’s skin as he began to circle his finger, one stinging sensation to mend the other until he could push a second finger in.

“You’re doing so good, Lukey.” Michael’s kisses became gentle as he kissed back up Luke’s neck. “Just one more finger, okay?”

Luke nodded, focussing on Michael’s lips on his, Michael’s tongue licking into his mouth. Luke clenched around Michael’s fingertips, his whole body shuddering when Michael’s fingers grazed something inside him and his whole body shook with a surge of electricity running through his veins.

“Michael, fuck- fuck Michael. Do that again.”

"What?" Michael asked, confused.

"That! Keep doing that," Luke whispered, his eyes closing as Michael’s fingers, three of them now, brushed his prostate. Michael’s breath was hot against his cheek and Luke moaned at the feeling of his hole getting slacker and wet with lube, Michael’s fingers inside him curling and rubbing him against all the right places.

"Does it feel good?" Michael asked, tilting his head so he could catch a glimpse of Luke’s eyes. Luke nodded. It felt good, indescribably good. But Luke needed more.

"I'm ready," Luke breathe out. "I'm ready, please Michael, get inside me."

"Are you sure?" Michael asked for the millionth time that night, gently pulling his fingers out.

"Yes, I'm sure.” Luke would have rolled his eyes if he would have had any control over his facial expressions left. “I want to feel you right now. Please, Michael."

Luke nodded and Michael smiled at his attitude. He kissed Luke’s mouth and nose and eyelids before he sat back. Michael struggled to put the condom on with lube-slick fingers but eventually he had managed. Their eyes met as Michael pushed into him and Luke thought that the entire universe could have collapsed onto itself, he wouldn’t have noticed. He was captured by Michael’s gaze. In the low light of Michael’s room, Michael’s eyes seemed jet black, no green left in them. Michael leaned over until he could balancing himself on one arm while guiding his cock to Luke’s hole.

“I love you.” Luke said before Michael could ask and Michael smiled, dipped down and pressed their lips together as he pushed in.

Luke’s breath cut short at the overwhelmingness of it all. His fingers cramped in the sheets, a low whimper escaping his lips. It stung, the burn of the stretch so intense that Luke had to squeeze his eyes shut, focussing on his breathing entirely. Michael stilled the moment he had bottomed out.

“You’re doing so good, Lukey.” Michael ran his hand up and down Luke’s side. His voice was strained and Luke wished for the pain to just fade away already so they could continue, so that Michael could move and didn’t have to wait for Luke’s stupid body to adjust. “You’re so good. So good, Lukey.”

“You can move,” Luke rasped out after what felt like half an eternity. “I’m ready, I think.”

Michael’s gaze was doubtful but he did as Luke told him and began to pull out slowly. Luke muffled the noise he made in his hand. He knew that if he cried out Michael would stop and blow this whole thing off and Luke couldn’t have that. Not just because he refused to let Michael down, but also because he could feel it. The small jolts of pleasure mixing with the pain, slowly but surely taking over.

Luke let out a breathy moan when Michael pushed into him again and gripped Michael’s shoulder. He shuddered when the head of Michael’s cock dragged over that spot again.

“Yeah, yeah like that.” Luke gripped Michael’s shoulder. “You can go- you can go faster. A little bit.”

“F-fuck,” Michael stuttered and bucked his hips. His breathing was ragged, nearly as ragged as Luke’s and Luke thought that he could have come from that alone, hearing Michael curse like that because of him, hear his name spill over Michael’s lips like that. “Fuck, Luke.”

Slowly but surely, Michael build up a rhythm. Once he felt like all of the pain had faded, Luke tried to buck his hips in time with Michael’s thrusts. The moan Michael uttered at that made Luke clench around him.

And it was easy. Luke wanted to laugh that he had ever been nervous about doing this, and doing this with Michael. Luke wasn’t sure something had ever felt as natural to him as sleeping with Michael. He just fit, fit around Michael’s hips.

Hungrily, Luke pulled Michael down by his hair and crashed their mouths together. They didn’t really kiss, didn’t manage to. It was more like their open mouths sliding against each other, but it was enough for Luke. He crossed his legs behind the small of Michael’s back, tried to get Michael just that much deeper.

Luke whined when Michael curled his hand around his thigh and pushed his legs further apart. The change of angle punched the air right out of Luke’s lungs and soon he found himself gripping onto Michael for dear life as Michael thrust into him more harshly than before. Luke found himself unable to keep his voice down and he thanked all the gods he knew that Michael’s parents were out for dinner still. Moans and curses spilled out of his mouth uninhibitedly and he couldn’t help the heat that was rapidly pooling in his stomach.

The way their bodies moved together felt good, felt brilliant and Luke could feel his muscles tighten at the thought that they were inseparable like this, electricity zipping through his veins until the muscles of his stomach clenched abruptly.

“I’m almost there, I’m almost there, Michael, I’m almost… almost-” Luke lost all coherent thought as all the pent up heat in his lower body exploded at the bottom of his spine and he fell into bliss, clenching impossibly tight around Michael as he did so.

Michael above him groaned, his thrusts becoming erratic before Michael’s hips stuttered and then he was fucking into Luke slowly, breathlessly, riding out his orgasm as long as it lasted. Luke could tell the exact moment Michael came down from his high, as he collapsed right on top of Luke. Luke, who felt boneless, didn’t hesitate to wrap his arms around Michael. He clung to Michael and this moment, the feeling of Michael, not fully soft yet, still inside of him, Michael’s lips mouthing silent, incoherent words of reverence into his shoulder.

Luke winced when Michael did pull out eventually and rolled himself off of Luke and the bed. Luke tried the burn image into his brain, Michael’s pale skin glowing in the low lighting as he traipsed into the en suite, the way his naked body moved.

Luke had nearly fallen asleep by the time Michael came back. Michael cleaned him up without solicitation and Luke really wanted to kiss him. He would, as soon as Michael’s lips were within reach. Once Michael had wiped off Luke’s arse and thighs, scrubbed the dried lube off his own thighs, he simply threw the washcloth behind him.

Luke laughed at that and rolled himself half on top of Michael as soon as the other boy had slid back under the duvet. Michael’s chest was sticky with sweat but Luke didn’t care. Pecking Michael’s sternum, Luke groped around until he had found Michael’s hand and interlaced their fingers.

“Hey, Luke?”

Luke hummed.

“That was okay, yeah?”

Luke lifted his head so that he could meet Michael’s eyes. Luke hated the sincere uncertainty in them.

“It was brilliant.” Luke smiled. “I love you. Loved that.”

Michael beamed at him and Luke, content that he had eradicated all of the self doubts that Michael carried but rarely allowed to surface for the night, let his head fall back, snuggled deeper into Michael’s chest. He could feel Michael smile into his hair as he drifted off.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this update took forever. I finished my internship, got through Hell Week and now uni has started back up again keeping me busy busy. I hope you like this one!

**“Where you've been, what you had to eat  
** **Say I'm always watching you, always watching you”** **  
** **\- I Got Sick // Don Broco**

Luke could hear the yelling even before he had knocked on the door of Michael’s house. It was muffled but Luke could make out several voices shouting, one of them unmistakably Michael. Furrowing his brows, Luke rasped his knuckles over the varnished wood of Michael’s front door and waited. It was Ashton who opened him, a strained smile appearing on his face as he spotted Luke. Beyond the polite smile, Ashton looked downright miserable, Luke noticed. 

“Hey, man.” 

Luke forewent any greeting in favour of cutting right to the core. “You look upset. What’s up?” 

Ashton’s smile became more strained. Instead of an answer, Ashton motioned him to follow. Luke did, trudging behind Ashton into the living room. 

“... fucking told me! What the hell were you thinking? You could’ve-” Michael broke off when he spotted Luke in the doorway and not a second later, Luke found himself wrapped up in arms. The visor of the snapback Michael was wearing backwards pressed into Luke’s cheek. 

“Luke,” Michael mumbled against his shoulder, like a blessing, before letting him go. Not completely though. Michael’s arm remained on the small of Luke’s back as Luke looked around. Ashton had positioned himself behind Calum who was standing in the middle of the room, his arms crossed in front of his chest and brows furrowed. 

Luke looked at Michael. “What’s up in here?” 

“Huh? What should be up?” Michael smiled at him. It didn’t mask the murderous expression in his eyes at all. Michael was so obviously lying that Luke rolled his eyes. 

“Don’t even try, Michael. I heard your little screaming match from the street already.” Luke glanced at Calum who averted his eyes to the ground. “So tell me.” 

Michael looked at him for a long moment before he sighed and turned towards Ashton. Ashton bit his lip, seemingly melting into Calum’s shadow. 

“C’mon, man,” Luke prompted. 

Ashton sighed but took a step forward. He refused to meet Luke’s eyes as he pulled his phone out of his back pocket. “You remember when we did that writing session these days, right?” 

Luke nodded. Suddenly, he had a feeling what this was about. 

“Well, I kinda… messed up.” Ashton sniffed and Calum moved, rubbed his friend’s shoulder. Ashton took the time to smile at Calum before he looked at Luke. “I posted a pic of my cajon with the caption:  _ back in the studio, big love xx _ .” 

“That’s not bad, is it?” Feeling a little bit confused, Luke glanced at Michael whose gaze darkened with pent up anger. 

“No that wouldn’t have been bad,” Michael said, taking over. “But Ashton forgot to turn his location off.” 

Luke needed a couple of moments to realise what that meant. When he did, he felt something inside his stomach twist violently. No. Luke dug his nails into the skin around his belly button, trying to get his muscles to relax by force. “Are there- are there paparazzi?” 

“Our guess is fans,” Calum said and for the first time since Luke had entered the room, he met Luke’s eyes directly. There was something in his dark eyes that Luke didn’t like. Not at all. 

“Well, do you- do you know for sure that they found you?” Luke sounded foolish, even to his own ears. 

“Oh, they didn’t find us,” Ashton mumbled. 

At the same time Calum turned his head towards Michael. “I think you should show him now, Mike.” 

“Show me what?” Slowly, but surely Luke felt anger rise in his chest. Luke knew it was more out of nervousness than anything else, but he also hated being left in the dark. And that was exactly what Michael was trying to do as Luke realised belatedly. Seething, he turned towards Michael. “You can’t keep this from me! Tell me now!” 

For the fraction of a second, there was fight in Michael’s eyes and his posture became rigid but then he was surrendering. With gritted teeth, Michael pulled out his phone from his back pocket. He tapped around on the screen for a couple of moments and then turned the screen towards Luke. Luke wasn’t wearing his glasses so he had to take a step closer. He took the phone from Michael’s hands and raised it to his eyes. 

It was a photo, very clearly taken on a phone. The quality was way to grainy to be professionally done. The shot itself wasn’t particularly exciting either. It was just Luke, standing in front of a fruit display. Frowning, Luke scrolled on and his heart fell to his knees. In the second photo, Michael was with him, pressed against Luke from behind. 

They weren’t kissing. It wasn’t a definite outing, but it made a suggestion. The way Michael had an arm slung around his neck, his hand resting on Luke’s heart, and his chin hooked over Luke’s shoulder was a little too close for comfort, a little too close to be entirely platonic if one was looking for it. The newspaper article the photos belonged to didn’t suggest such a thing, but the comments below the article sure did. Luke didn’t make it through the first few before he handed the phone back to Michael, took a physical step back. 

Luke shook his head violently. “No.” 

“Lukey-” Michael tried, but Luke cut him off. He couldn’t endure Michael talking to him right now. 

“No.” Luke shook his head even more vehemently. He clutched a hand over his mouth. Bile rose in his throat. “How many- how many people have seen that?” 

When no one answered him, Luke moved on to a different question. “Who took that photo?” 

“We don’t know, not for sure,” Calum said, taking pity on him. Michael was just staring at him and Luke hated Michael, hated the big, apologetic expression in his eyes. “It popped up first on an update account but we think it was a stan.” 

“Who’s Stan?” 

“No,” Calum interrupted him. A tiny, deprecating smile appeared on Calum’s face as he shook his head. “A stan like the Eminem song. A stalker fan.” 

The words made something in Luke’s stomach turn. He looked at Ashton, trying to find some kind of answer in his eyes. Ashton looked downright miserable now, his hazel eyes brimming with sorry and Luke lost it. 

“You!” he bellowed, stabbing Ashton’s chest through the air. “You did this to me!” 

Almost in an instant, Calum wedged himself into his line of vision. 

“Stop yelling at Ashton,” Calum told him. His voice was quiet, deadly so. Luke didn’t make the mistake of thinking Calum wouldn’t punch him in the face if he took a step closer to them. “Ashton didn’t do this.” 

“What do you mean he didn’t do this?” Luke fumed. He was about to dispute whatever Calum was thinking and force his way around him to Ashton’s throat after all when he noticed that neither Calum nor Ashton were looking at him. They were focussing on something behind Luke’s shoulder. Luke whipped around and Michael flinched. The snapback he had been clutching between his fingers fell from his hands.    
  


**“Drive highways and byways to be there with you  
** **Over and over the only truth”** **  
** **\- This Town // Niall Horan**

Luke made sure none of the stalls of the men’s room were occupied before walking into the last stall on the right and locking the door behind him. He perched himself onto the toilet seat, close enough to the narrow window so that his phone still received some of the school wifi. Watching the minutes pass on his lockscreen, Luke propped his earphones into his ears and waited. At exactly 10 am, his phone began to ring. Smiling, Luke accepted the skype call. 

It took a couple of seconds for the signal to translate around half the world, but then Michael’s face appeared on his screen. The quality was grainy, but it was enough for Luke. 

“Hey!” Michael cheered into the camera, holding his face close to the camera before letting himself fall back against the wall in his back. Luke recognised the white grout. Michael had withdrawn himself onto his bunk bed in the room he shared with two other contestants. Faintly, Luke could hear other people’s voices, presumably shouting about the TV in the next room.

“Hi,” Luke smiled and, uncaring of how sappy it was, pressed his finger to the screen. “You alone?” 

“Yeah,” Michael grinned. “The others are watching  _ Saw _ in the living room.” Michael’s expression softened as he propped a pillow behind his back. “I missed your face. Tell me about your day.” 

Luke uttered a noncommittal noise. “Eh. Nothing exciting has happened so far. Paul almost burned his eyebrow off when he tried to shut off his Bunsen burner but that’s about it. Everything’s the same old same old here, as always. Tell me about your dayinstead. How’s it going with becoming a rockstar today?” 

“Oh, man, let me tell you…” Gesturing excitedly with the hand that wasn’t his phone, Michael launched himself into a rundown of what was happening at the casting camp. Luke needed a the first couple of minutes to get over the intense missing in his chest, but eventually he managed to tune into what Michael was saying.

Michael told him a story about his song-writing class, then moved on to enthuse about all the junk food the catering offered before jumping into an anecdote of an undoubtly illegal, undoubtly funny-if-you-were-there stunt that Michael had pulled off the night before with one of the camp kids he had befriended. 

"Trust me, Luke, that Ashton guy, he's hilarious." 

Because their days were so packed with workshops and interviews and other things Luke could only imagine, Michael kept talking nonstop for nearly half an hour. 

Luke didn’t mind. He savoured the happy glint in Michael’s eyes, all the excitement radiating off of the other boy. The sight of Michael being so lively was worth it to Luke, all the miles between them and the long nights he spent alone now, Michael dropping out of school and the classes Luke missed in order to make their timezones work. 

It was too soon until the school bell rang over Luke’s head, announcing that the period Luke had skipped was over. 

“No,” Michael whined and interrupted his story in order to pout at the camera. 

Luke wanted to do the same, but he knew that if he did none of them would be able to hang up and Luke had Maths next, a class he had to attend or his mother would skin him alive. 

“I need to go.” Luke sighed into the camera and took a screenshot of Michael’s pouting face for later, when the yearning in his chest would become unbearable. 

Michael let out a deep, long-suffering sigh. “I love you.” 

Luke lifted the phone close to his face, pretended he was sitting in front of Michael on the twin-size mattress. “I love you,” he whispered back. 

A tiny smile appeared on Michael’s face. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Just six more weeks, then I’ll be home.” 

“Six more weeks,” Luke repeated. Five weeks and three days, he thought in his head. Luke had been counting, marking a cross in his calendar every day during lunch after he had hung up on Michael. 

“Actually just five weeks and three days,” Michael mused and Luke couldn’t help the half-laugh, half-sob that escaped his lips. He ended the skype call before he really stayed on the phone, but he wasn’t fast enough to miss the preening expression on Michael’s face. Luke needed another couple of minutes to calm down once the screen of his phone had gone black. 

When he eventually made it out of the stall, the halls outside of the restroom were quiet. Luke took his time washing his hands, splattered some cold water onto his face. After he had dried his hands on his jeans, he pressed a finger into the fabric of his sweater where his heart was beating. If only he could will the pain there to subside. Smiling as Luke felt his phone vibrated in his back pocket, alerting him to an incoming text, Luke left the restroom.    
  


**“Go be the one that keeps on fighting  
** **Go be the stranger”  
** **\- The Immortals // Kings of Leon**

Luke remembered the last time he had seen Michael with the hat. 

A terrible, heavy feeling settled in Luke’s stomach like asphalt engulfing his organs. “You knew that they were here.”

Michael winced. “We saw some tweets before Ashton messed up, but…” 

“No!” Luke felt his breath come short with the blinding rage that was making his lungs contract. “You- The night after we slept together for the first time you came into the shop wearing that cap and sunglasses!” Luke could feel himself getting hoarse he was screaming so loudly. “That’s a disguise! You knew then already!

“We didn’t think they’d find us!” Michael yelled back, exasperated. Not at Luke, Michael was exasperated because of the situation they were in, but in this moment that didn’t matter to Luke. He was scared, and that made him furious. “And it was all fine until Ash-”

“Ashton doesn’t matter right now!” 

Where he was still hiding behind Calum, Ashton’s eyes had grown as wide as saucers, filled with guilt. 

“You’re the one who’s connected to me! You should have warned me the moment you knew they were here!” Luke broke off, nausea making his head spin. Blindly, he pressed a hand to his head.

“I’m sorry, Luke!” Ashton called over Calum’s shoulder. 

“How did they even know to search for me?” Luke directed at Michael. 

“I don’t know.” Michael raked a hand through his hair, causing the dyed strands to stick up into the air. “When I signed the contract and became straight for the rest of the world, they told me they’d erased every trace of us, of you. As far as the internet goes, you and I never even knew each other.” 

“They must have gone to the school first,” Calum spoke up after a couple of moments of tense silence. His expression was dark, but otherwise indecipherable. In the dimmed light of the overhead lamp, his eyes seemed black. “That’s online. And once they knew which school you went to, Mike,  they just had to go there and look for traces of Michael. They’ve probably taken a look into the yearbook or summat.” 

Luke paled. There were tons of photos of Luke and Michael in the yearbook. It had been pretty impossible for any of the photography club kids to get a shot without them together before Michael had left. Luke raked his brain, prayed that there were none of them kissing. But in the end, it didn’t matter. The damage was done anyways. 

“So they stalked  _ me _ ?” Luke felt his heartbeat speed up drastically as a terrible thought occurred to him. He could live with the fact that these people had invaded his privacy like that. He had grown accustomed to the thought that being with Michael meant becoming somewhat famous as well in the long run a long time ago. But Luke had thought of red carpet events and TV cameras panning to his happy face when Michael won some kind of music price. Luke never imagined it like this. “If they found me and you at the supermarket, what if they followed us home?” Luke’s voice dropped into a hiss. “What if they found  _ my family _ ?”  

After a couple of beats of remorseful, not-quite-meeting-his-eyes silence from the other three men in the room, Luke pressed a hand over his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut. It felt like a bilious, cold hand had gripped his intestines and was squeezing them, the knowledge that someone might have taken pictures of his house as well. Luke imagined candids of his mother in the kitchen. The thought made his skin crawl, but Luke forced himself to breathe more calmly. 

He needed to pull himself together if he wanted to sort out this mess and protect them. Luke thought of waves crashing against the shore and flowers blooming. He could do this. He had done it once before for his father. When Luke pried his eyes open, he found Michael hovering above him, an unfamiliar, nervous glint in his eyes. 

Nonetheless, Michael’s words were different from what Luke had expected him to say. “You have to calm down. It’s just a bunch of teenagers.” 

“Just a bunch of-” Luke gaped at Michael for several heartbeats before he snapped his mouth shut. His anger made a striking comeback, made the blood rush through his veins. “Fuck you!” 

“Luke!” Michael gave back, just as irritated. 

“No! Fuck you!” It took every ounce left of Luke’s self control not to push Michael hard. “How dare you say that? How dare you play this down? This is your fault! You brought them here! You came back and brought them here!” 

“It’s just a bunch of kids!” 

“You don’t know that!” 

“Yes, I know that! They are fans, Luke. Sure, they took it too far, but they did it because they miss us.” Michael gestured between himself, Calum and Ashton. “And I can’t fault them for that. They did it out of love.” 

Luke fish-mouthed at Michael for a good couple of seconds. All the rage he felt was making his thoughts tumble over each other, his limbs shake. 

“Tell me you aren’t serious.” 

“I am dead serious.” There was a hard edge to Michael’s mouth all of a sudden and Luke recoiled, if not visibly. “This is what my life is like, Luke. It’s a shitty situation, yes, but we have people that deal with things like that. They are already at it as we speak. These things happen. And we’ll deal with it, too.” Michael pointed first at Luke and then at himself. The way he said those last words was familiar to Luke. Michael had said it a million times before, in so many different ways. It always boiled down to the same thing. It was the two of them against the world, invincible. Somehow Luke found it hard to believe Michael was on his team this time.  

Slowly, calmly, he leaned forward and held Michael’s gaze. “These things do not just happen, Michael. You can’t just downplay it like that. They came into our hometown. They followed us to the freaking supermarket. This is not okay... this is crazy!” 

There was a flash of emotion in Michael’s eyes, something that was hurt and despair and anger all at the same time, but then his green eyes became dull, stone cold like the rest of Michael’s face. “You’ll have to get used to it if you want to be with me.” 

It was a threat so blandly spoken that it cut Luke to the core. He felt his breath hitch, his heart skip a beat. The expression on his face must have been telling of how he felt because a second later Ashton finally took a step forward and grabbed Calum’s arm. 

“Uh, we should go and… leave you two to talk this out. Sorry, Luke. Again.” 

Luke waved Ashton off without taking his eyes off of Michael. Michael watched his bandmates go, waited until Calum had closed the living room door behind them before he focussed back on Luke. 

His expression softened as he took a step forward and took Luke’s hand. Luke breathed in the familiar scent of Michael’s shampoo and home and relaxed as Michael cupped his cheek. If Luke hadn’t been so used to it, he would have marveled at how easily Michael’s touch alone made him breathe easier. 

There was nothing but fierce, yet gentle determination in Michael’s eyes as he said, “I am famous, Luke. I can’t change that about myself. There will always be people that cross the line. There will always be fans that take it too far. Things like what we’re dealing with now will continue to happen. But we’ll deal with this together, okay? I need you to trust me on this. Can you?” 

Luke sighed, but nodded. “Of course.” 

Michael’s smile was blinding before he sobered up again. “You just gotta tell me how you feel and I’ll do everything to make it better. We can do this.” 

Luke smiled when Michael kissed him softly, pressed their foreheads together. 

“I don’t wanna fight,” Michael mumbled into the space between their lips. “Not now when tonight’s the first night you’re officially mine again.” 

Luke felt his stomach clench, but for a different reason. He squirmed, up until the point where Michael pulled away from him. There was a crease between Michael’s eyebrows when he searched Luke’s eyes.  

“About that…” Luke trailed off. He bit his lip. 

“Luke,” Michael whispered. “Tell me you broke up with him.” 

Luke winced. “I’m sorry.”

Michael blinked. Michael’s mouth opened as if he wanted to speak but no sound made it past his lips. He pressed them into a tight line and cast his eyes downwards. Luke knew the expression on Michael’s face. If Luke would have been anyone else, he would have bolted out of the room as fast as possible. Luke thought of a thousand different ways to explain the situation to Michael, but he stayed silent, watched Michael’s shoulders heave as the air between them filled with ozone. 

“It’s not what it looks like, I swear,” Luke started, eventually, but Michael cut him off with a single jerk of his head. 

His voice was hoarse when he spoke, “You promised.” 

Luke meant to speak again but Michael’s gaze was blazing when he looked up and his body stilled where he had been fighting for composure. 

“Tell me, Luke,” Michael said and looked at him, but looked right through him. “Who’s it gonna be?” 


	13. Chapter 13

**“And I don’t know who you are** **  
** **When you’re sleeping in someone else’s bed”  
** **\- Fireworks // You Me At Six**

Luke was sitting on his bed, scrolling through his phone when the doorbell rang. He knew that what he was doing was a terrible idea, searching for his own name on the internet, but Luke couldn’t help but look for the aftershocks of the article Michael had shown him, look for other articles that exposed him to the world. So far he hadn’t found much, nothing more than a couple of gossip rags and tumblr posts. But the number of posts and tweets and articles was growing, exponentially so. His twitter followers had been multiplying so much he had set his account on private. As a precaution, Luke had also unfriended all his family members. 

He looked up when his door opened. 

“Hey. Your mother let me in.” 

Luke smiled and locked his phone. He met Will in the middle of his room, slung his arms around the older man’s shoulders. 

“Woah, hey.” Will laughed into his ear. “What’s up with you?” 

“Nothing.” Luke rested his head on Will’s shoulder. There was light in the window opposing his. Luke hugged Will for longer than what was probably inconspicuous. Then he let go, smiled as Will took his hand. “I just missed you, is all.” 

“Well, I missed you, too.” Will gently tugged him closer, cupped Luke’s face in his hand as he kissed him. Luke swallowed the surprised noise Will uttered when he tried to pull away but Luke wouldn’t let him. Instead, Luke chased after him, kept pressing their lips together. Luke savoured the warm, safe feeling Will’s arms around his waist gave him, the tingle in his stomach. This was good. This was safe. This would never get big enough to make the edges of Luke’s world burst. 

“Luke,” Will caught his hands when Luke began to unbutton the top of Will’s dress shirt. There was no rejection in Will’s eyes as he searched Luke’s, just curiosity and confusion and Luke wanted to cry because Will was perfect and there was just one way Luke would be able to keep him now. “What are you doing?”

“I just thought,” Luke bit his lip. He played with the hem of Will’s shirt. “We’ve been together for some time now, so…” 

“Love,” Will said, gently, and tipped Luke’s head upwards with his pointer finger, “are you sure you know what you’re saying? Are you sure about this? Because I distinctly remember the way you flinched away from me when we met. And I don’t want you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with. I have no problem with taking it slow. At all. I love you more than that.” 

“No.” Luke took a deep breath. “I’m not that person anymore. I’m- I want to feel you. I want this.” 

Will searched his eyes for another couple of moments before his gaze softened and he leaned forward. “Okay.” 

Luke was quick to deepen the kiss Will granted him. He pushed his hands under the sweater Will was wearing and pushed it up over his head, then returning to popping the buttons on Will’s dress shirt. Will rid him of the shirt he was wearing, then let his mouth wander in open-mouthed kisses down Luke’s neck. Luke scraped his nails over the short bristles at the back of Will’s head. He pried open his eyes and let out a low moan. Nothing but darkness greeted him when Luke looked out of his window.

 

**“I may never sleep tonight** **  
** **As long as you’re still burning bright”** **  
** **\- Trade Mistakes // Panic! At The Disco**

When their new manager had told them about the business meetings they would have to attend, Michael had thought of stuffy rooms with people in uncomfortable suits and joyless faces. He had learnt quickly that the people working for Feldy didn’t operate like that. 

“This is so cool,” Ashton whispered as he looked around the fancy downtown bar, slid into the booth after Calum.

“Whatcha wanna drink boys?” Feldy gestured towards the menu lying in the middle of the round table. Michael reflexively smiled back at the perpetual, sunny grin on the producer’s face. He felt nerves, the good, exciting kind swirling around in his stomach. Once Calum, Ashton and Michael had given him their drink orders, Feldy got up and made a beeline for the bar. Michael was about to tune into the conversation Calum and Ashton were having next to him when he felt his phone vibrate in his back pocket. Struggling to get out of the booth, Michael shot his bandmates a smile and a “I’ll be right back” before he hurried towards the green exit sign above the door next to the bar.

Michael got his phone out of his back pocket while he stepped through the exit door. Despite the miserable smell of the dumpsters that was clogging the back alley he had entered, he smiled as he pressed his phone against his ear. 

“Lukey,” Michael sighed into the receiver and looked up. There were no stars in LA, but Michael could still make out the few, grey tufts that were visible in the night sky against the never-ending lights. 

“Hey.” 

Michael frowned as he heard the tired note to Luke’s voice, but then he realised that Luke had just gotten out of school. Michael thanked his mother every day that she had allowed him to drop out when he had gotten the casting call. Especially now that it had all paid off, Michael felt victorious. 

”How’s it going, babe?” he asked, taking a step further into the alley. Michael pressed his fingertips against the dingy brick wall of the opposite building, painted Luke’s face onto it with his mind. “Finals already getting to you? Just five more weeks, right?” 

“Four.” 

“Oh.” Michael grinned. “Even better. Think of it, Lukey, just four more weeks and then you never have to set foot into high school again.” 

“I gotta come back to collect my diploma,” Luke corrected him, but Michael could hear the faint smile to his voice. There was a beat of silence as Michael could hear Luke shift on what was presumably his bed. 

Luke’s voice was unexpectedly meek as he spoke up again, slightly muffled from where Michael could imagine Luke’s cheek smushed into his pillow, “Michael? Do you think you’re gonna be there when I collect it? My graduation?”

“Luke,” Michael forced the smile to stay on his face. He shook his head. “Of course, I’ll be there. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” 

Michael felt a pang of guilt in his chest as he listened to Luke breathe, shallow but evenly. It had been a long time since Michael had last been home, much longer than had been planned in the beginning. The original plan had been for him to come home after the two months the casting camp had been supposed to run, but then Michael had been elected into the band. And in the six months since then, Michael’s schedule had been so cramped with meetings and song-writing sessions and social gatherings that there simply had been no time to come home, as his mother made sure to remind him of every single time he called her. Michael had been bad with calling lately. Nonetheless, he hated that Luke was doubting him. 

“I’ll be there and I will bring a sign and cheer so loud I can see your cheeks go red from the back of the room.” Michael’s smile broadened as he could hear Luke’s breathing stutter. “That’s right. I’ll be there and I’ll be embarrassing as hell because my boyfriend is getting his diploma and that’s fucking awesome!”

“I miss you,” Luke said after a moment. 

“I miss you too.” 

Michael felt a warm hand tug at the strings of his heart. He didn’t allow himself to think too deeply about how much he missed Luke. It was rare that the missing pulled him under, left his lungs seizing up. Most of the time Michael was busy enough to keep the thoughts of Luke at bay. But in quiet moments like this, when it was just the two of them and half the world in between, Michael felt Luke’s absence in every cell of his body. “Tell me about your day, babe. How was your dentist’s appointment?”

“That’s next Friday.”

“Oh,” Michael said and let his eyes wander around the alley, pushed the remnants of a beer bottle out of the way with his boot. “Oh fuck!” Michael yelled and jumped back, watching a small but distinct shadow dart back underneath the dumpsters. 

“Michael?! Are you okay?” 

“Yeah, I think I just saw a rat.” Michael took several steps back into the salving light above the exit door. “Sorry, I’m listening. Tell me about school. Anyone else falling victim to the graduation madness?” 

“The Science Club has been roped into the senior prank.” 

“Oh, no. How’d that happen?”

Luke let out a long-suffering sigh as he went on to ramble about the prank committee’s haughty yet desperate attempts at convincing the Science Club to join them in the shenanigans. Luke became more lively as he talked and Michael found himself more at ease the longer he listened to Luke. Everything was was happening so much so fast in his life at the moment, but Luke’s voice would always be there to talk him down. 

“... and then the best thing was, trust me, you won’t believe this, they-”

“Yo, Clifford!” 

Michael whipped around as his name was called to find Calum standing on the threshold of the exit door, keeping the heavy metal door open with his arm. “C’mon back in! Feldy’s friends are here.” 

Michael lifted the phone from his head before saying, “Shit, okay, I’ll be right there.” 

Michael motioned his new bandmate to go back inside before he pressed the phone back to his ear. 

“Lukey? Sorry. I gotta go.” 

“Of course you do.” 

Michael frowned at the sudden, returned tiredness in Luke’s voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“Nothing.”

Michael didn’t have to be able to see his face to know about the hard edge to Luke’s mouth as he spoke. 

“Don’t ‘nothing’ me, Lukey.” Michael ground the heel of his boot against the asphalt. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

The line was silent for a couple of seconds. 

“We haven’t even talked for five minutes, Michael. This is the first time you even picked up this week. The last time I’ve seen your face was on the teeny bopper magazine that I walked by on my way out of Coles. I just don’t… I’m tired of you not being here. And I know that you don’t do it on purpose, but...” 

Fear was an unfamiliar taste on Michael’s tongue. Michael grit his teeth as his shoulders tensed up and his heartbeat went into overdrive. He would have given anything for the blood rushing in his ears to stop and the upheaval of panic in his chest to cease. 

“But what?” Michael forced himself to ask. 

“I don’t know if this works anymore, Michael.”

“Don’t say that.” His voice was raw all of a sudden. “You don’t mean that.” 

“I’m just-”

“It’s us.” Michael’s breathing became ragged as he struggled to pick up any coherent thought in the jumbling mess of aversion and Luke’s words in his head. “It’s us. We’re gonna get through this. We’re not- we can’t break up. I’ll do better. I’ll try harder, I swear.”

“Really?” The cold tone to Luke’s voice was piercing like a knife in Michael’s side. He blinked rapidly, trying to keep his eyes from watering, tried to breathe. “Because it has been me alone, lately, Michael. Just me.”

“Baby, please.”

“I need you here.” Luke pulled up his nose and it was then that Michael realised that Luke was crying, too. Michael pressed his hand to his face, rubbed the salt into his skin. “I know you can’t come home yet, but I need… I need you with me. I don’t care in what way. Just-” 

“I’ll text you every day,” Michael hurried to say. “Twice. I’ll make videos if we can’t skype. Everything you want. Please, I beg you, don’t say that you wanna break up with me ever again.” 

“I don’t want to. I just-”

“I know. I know. I’m so sorry for neglecting you, babe. I never should have taken you for granted.  I promise I’ll do so much better. I love you, Luke. I love you so much.” 

“Don’t fade again.”

“I won’t.” Michael felt his heart seize with how much he meant it. “I’m sorry, I gotta go but I will text you the moment I’m back at the hotel.” 

On the other end of the line, Luke took a big breath before saying, “Okay.” 

“Okay.” Michael nodded his head at no one. “Okay. I love you.” 

“I love you, too.” 

Michael felt the sound of the line going dead reverberate against his skull. As soon as he could move again, he drafted a text message to send Luke later and set an alarm to send it. After that,  Michael took another minute to calm down. It was fine. He was fine. Looking back at it, Michael thought, their conversation had been nothing but a bump in the road. He smiled. Once his breathing had returned to normal, Michael pushed his phone into his back pocket and pulled the exit door open. 

 

**“This is a calling out for truth** **  
** **Even when the tides are cruel”** **  
** **\- Waterfall // With Confidence**

Luke pressed his eyes back shut. Will maneuvered them towards the bed, pushed his leg between Luke’s thighs. His hand wandered to the front of Luke’s jeans, palming him through the fabric. It were times like these when Luke remembered that Will was four years older than him, and a lot more experienced. Will’s hands were hot on his body, and he let himself fall back. Will followed him, kneeling between his legs and keeping himself up on one arm as he leaned over Luke. 

Luke’s heart picked up pace as Will slotted their mouths back together, Will’s hand wandering to the fly on Luke’s jeans. While Will worked his fly open, he let his mouth wander downwards. Luke threw his arm over his eyes, focussed on his breathing as Will kissed down his chest. He thought his heart may beat out of his chest with how hard it was pounding against his rib cage. 

“Luke.” 

Reluctantly, Luke took his arm off his eyes and lifted his head so he could look at Will, sitting between his thighs. Luke looked at where Will’s hands were resting on his thighs and then in between and Luke realised that he saw nothing. Luke was not the slightest bit hard. Luke’s stomach bottomed out. 

“I’m sorry,” he wrenched out, surprised by how much his own voice was shaking. 

Will shook his head, holding his gaze. There was no accusation in his eyes and Luke felt the need to retch with how tightly cold hands were clutching his guts. 

“It’s fine,” Will said softly, eventually, and made to get off the bed. 

“No, wait!” Luke tried to grab for him but Will was already standing. 

“I’m not leaving,” Will consoled him and began picking up his clothes from the floor. Luke averted his eyes to his knees, made sure to not accidentally look at Will’s face or the bulge still prominent in his chinos. As soon as Will had put his clothes back on, he sat down at the edge of Luke’s bed, beckoning Luke to his side. Luke hurried to situate himself next to him. 

“Talk to me,” Will pleaded, taking one of Luke’s hands in his. Luke tried hard not to flinch from the touch. It took every ounce of self-control Luke possessed not to bury his head in his hands. But Will deserved better than that. Will deserved the truth, and for Luke to look him in the eye when he told it to him. 

“I love you,” Luke said. He used his free hand to wipe his nose. 

Will smiled at him, the corners around his eyes crinkling, but there was a different edge to Will’s gaze now, a deeper level of understanding that made Luke’s heart stop short in his chest. 

“Yeah, maybe,” Will said and for the fraction of a second there was a cold in his voice Luke had never heard before but surely deserved. It was pain-induced. “But you’re not in love with me.” Will averted his eyes to the floor and then, much to Luke’s horror, to the window. “Not like you’re in love with him anyways.” 

“Will-” 

“I get it.” Will looked back at him and smiled. He waved his free hand.  “You know when I met you, you were this beautiful, heartbroken boy fresh out of school who was just trying to keep his family afloat and I didn’t care. I thought that all the things broken inside you would heal, at the latest when your dad did. And I thought that maybe if I gave you time, if I’d just be patient then you would fall for me. That my love could cure your sadness. But you were never sad because of your family. That wasn’t what was keeping you from committing to me, was it?” 

“I did,” Luke felt his eyes burn with all the mistakes he had made. “I fell for you, I swear.” 

“No, Luke.” Will’s smile was gentle, as gentle as the hand that came up to cup Luke’s cheek. “No you didn’t. You couldn’t. Your heart already belonged to someone else.”

Luke let his eyes flutter close at Will’s touch. He felt his skin sear with all the shame coursing through his blood. 

“You’re right,” he admitted. “You’re right. You’re right and I’m sorry. I never- I never meant to hurt you, Will.” 

“I know, love.” Will sighed and let his hand fall to his lap. “You changed when he came back, you know? At first I thought I was just imagining things but then I saw the way you looked at him at the street fest.”

“I was convinced I hated him back then. I wanted to hate him.” 

“Exactly.” Will smiled. “You were so… ruffled. He got to you. He got to you in a way I never did.” 

Luke heaved in a breath. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I-” Luke didn’t get much further as in the next moment, Will was getting to his feet. Only when Will had reached the door did Luke realise that the other man was leaving. 

“Please,” he choked out, “don’t go. I- I don’t want to lose you.” 

His hand on the handle, Will turned around and smiled at him. For the first time, it wasn’t kind. “I know, Luke, but you don’t have the right to ask me to stay anymore.”

Luke felt his lungs contract as the harsh truth of Will’s words registered in his brain. 

“I love you, but you will never reciprocate that and I’m too good to be a secondary character in your life. Truthfully, I hope that you think of me some time, when he makes you sad again, and realise what you have done. Lord knows, I’ll think of you. But I also hope that you’ll be happy. After everything I’ve seen, you two deserve each other.” 

Luke pressed his hand to his mouth to keep all the noises that wanted to escape him inside and watched, shaken by silent hiccups, as Will Compton walked out of his life. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To avoid confusion: the time order for this chapter is past - present - past, as opposed to the usual present - past (- present). Enjoy!

**“Let me come home to you** **  
** **Don’t let me lose you too”** **  
** **\- Home // Topic**

“And hence we must ask ourselves, why is Hero’s denouncement so integral to Shakespeare’s play?” 

Luke watched his teacher walk to the whiteboard. As usual, she failed to highlight the passage she was talking about on the screen and Luke dumped his head into the crook of his elbow, wishing for the lesson to just be over already. They were a week away from finals and his English teacher was still trying to hand them new information instead of revising with them. 

Luke closed his eyes, drowned out the waxings of his teacher by going over the quadratic formula in his head. His maths final was in less than five days and he had spent the night going over his notes from junior year. 

Luke hadn’t realised that he had dozed off until he was shaken by the shoulder. He jerked up, glared at Ian whose hand was still clutching his arm. 

“What?” Luke hissed before he realised that the entire room was quiet. His peers as well as the teacher were all looking at him. Embarrassed, Luke rubbed his face, tried to will the red from his cheeks. He mumbled out an apology for falling asleep, then he realised that the principal was standing in the doorframe of the classroom. Behind him, Luke spotted his brother. Jack’s face was impassive, but Luke could tell something was wrong. Jack had come home not ten hours ago. He was supposed to be in bed, sleeping off his hangover. Luke’s heart stopped beating right then and there. 

“What?” The word came over his lips, too loud and too frantic, before he could shove it back in. His voice sounded foreign to his own ears. “What happened?” 

“Gather your things, Mr Hemmings,” his principal said and the air of sympathy to his voice made Luke’s confusion fade into worry. “You’re freed from class.” 

Jack moved forward and through the rows, took Luke’s backpack and shoved his books inside. Jack’s movements were jerky, and it was the urgent look his brother shot him that finally shook Luke from his stupor. He stumbled after Jack, out of the classroom and through the halls. 

“What happened? Luke asked again once they reached the car park. 

Jack threw the backpack onto the backseat of their mother’s minivan before he looked at Luke over the hood of the car. It was only in the bright sunlight that Luke noticed the unusually reddened state of Jack’s eyes. 

“Dad had a heart attack,” Jack said and gritted his teeth, obviously fighting for composure. “He just crumbled while sorting through the new shipment of arabica beans. Mom called me from the ambulance. We’re going to the hospital. Get in the car.” 

Luke felt fear lace around his intestines. A thousand thoughts were racing through his mind, but all of them came down to the same thing: His dad might be dying. Luke pressed a hand to his mouth in order to keep from hyperventilating. He did as he was told and hurried to get into the passenger seat. 

Luke hadn’t been to the hospital in years, so the grey concrete walls and mint-coloured windows were only vaguely familiar to him. The last time Luke had seen them was when his brother Ben had broken his arm in eighth grade because the idiot had tried to skateboard over the hood of a car. 

They walked to the entrance doors in silence, and way to slowly for Luke’s liking, but he knew what Jack was doing. His brother wasn’t an emotional person, too much of a jock, too much of the always patronised, always patronising middle brother to show sadness. That he had cried at all was what worried Luke the most. He knew next to nothing about heart attacks. He wished he hadn’t forgotten his phone this morning so he could have looked up what it meant for his dad.  

Their mother was talking on the phone when Luke followed Jack into the waiting room of the emergency department. There were no tear tracks on her face, but Luke could see the fear behind his mother’s composed facade. 

Keeping the phone pressed to her ear, his mother pulled him into her arms. Luke buried his face in her shoulder and ignored the slight quiver to her hands as she began to card soothing fingers through his hair. Faintly, Luke could make out his eldest brother’s voice on the phone, talking. 

“You’re right, honey, we’ll have to wait for what they say. Yes, Luke’s here now. I’ll call you once I have an update. I love you, too.” 

His mother hung up shortly after. 

“Mum,” Luke pressed out once he felt able to lift his head from his mother’s shoulder. 

“Shh, I know, baby.” 

“Dad won’t die, will he?”

Luke felt his heart clench so painfully his breath hitched. The thought was too terrifying, too unimaginable to comprehend. His dad had been fine in the morning. He had made Luke sandwiches for school and even smuggled a Twix bar into the package while his mum hadn’t been looking. The Twix bar was still at the bottom of his backpack. 

Luke’s mum shook her head, somehow found the strength to muster up a smile. “No, of course not, honey. He’s getting surgery right now. They’ll fix him up and he’ll be as good as new.” 

Luke nodded. The rational part of his brain knew that his mum was not a doctor, not the surgeon and she couldn’t know, but the bigger part of Luke just trusted his mother to tell him the truth. None of his family had ever truly lied to him, and Luke believed with all his might that his mother wasn’t going to start now. 

“Okay.” Luke wiped his eyes. “Okay.”

“I’m gonna go to the vending machine,” Jack mumbled from behind them. With closed eyes, Luke listened to his footfalls, loud and squeaky on the linoleum floor, and matched his breathing to the tact. Then he let himself fall onto one of the cheap plastic chairs, curled himself into his mother’s side once she had taken the chair next to him. 

The next few hours might have been the longest in Luke’s life. He spent the time zoning out, watching people in varying degrees of distress enter and leave the waiting room while he ate himself through the small mountain of snacks Jack had gotten from vending machine. At the three hour mark, Luke couldn’t sit any longer. Frazzled by the ticking of the clock, unignorable once Luke had realised it was there, he got up, nearly tripping over Jack’s feet in his haste to stand up. 

“I’m gonna go get some fresh air,” Luke lowly informed his mother, who looked up from the magazine she had bought and nodded. Jack had fallen asleep against her side and Luke was careful not to wake him as he pulled his brother’s phone from his pocket. 

He was greeted by the blaring siren of an ambulance as he stepped out of the entrance doors of the emergency department. Luke made sure not to look as the EMTs rushed past him and walked several metres away. He took a few moments to just suck the fresh air into his lungs, then he looked down at his brother’s phone. It took Luke only two trials to unlock it. First he tried Jack’s birthday, then the one of his girlfriend. Celeste’s birthday did the job and Luke typed the number into the call pad from memory. Willing the sting in his eyes to subside, Luke pressed the phone to his ear. It took some time for the connection to build up, but eventually the dial tone came in even intervals. 

“C’mon,” Luke grunted out when he was redirected to voicemail. Gritting his teeth so hard his jaw hurt, Luke hung up and redialed. He waited for the familiar click that told him the call was connecting. Even at the fourth attempt it didn’t come. Luke tried two more times, then he gave up. It took all of Luke’s self control not to shatter Jack’s phone against the concrete as he seethed. Only when all the red had faded from his vision, Luke pocketed the phone and turned back to the hospital. 

There was a doctor standing in front of his family when Luke walked into the waiting room, causing Luke to run the rest of the distance. He arrived just in time to catch his mother’s crumbling form. It took Luke a moment to realise the sobbing coming from her mouth were happy tears. A look at his brother’s face confirmed Luke’s hope and he felt himself sag against his mother in relief. 

“You’ll have to come back tomorrow to visit him, but he’s stable for now and the bypass placement went really well. He’ll have to be cautious for a while and there are some dietary adjustments that have to be made, but we can talk about all of that tomorrow.” 

Looking up from his clipboard, the surgeon smiled at them. Luke could tell, how glad he was to have good news. Luke felt words of gratitude bubble up in his throat, but they didn’t make it past the lump in his throat. 

“Thank you, doctor.” Jack shook the man’s hand while Luke resorted to patting his mother’s back. 

“My pleasure.” The surgeon nodded at each of them before walking off, probably to save another family. 

As soon as he was gone, Jack threw his arms around Luke and their mother and let out a half-laugh half-cry. Luke reciprocated the noise and soon all of them were hysterically laughing. They kept cracking up the entire drive home, so much that eventually Luke’s mother had to pull to the side and let Jack take the wheel.

Once home, Luke sat himself down on the couch with Jack and mindlessly watched TV while their mother called Ben to update him on the situation. It wasn’t until they had gone through two of the Star Wars movies until Jack’s phone began to ring. 

“Why is Michael calling me?” Jack asked Luke, who snatched the phone up and speed-walked out of the room. He locked himself into the guest bathroom before answering. 

“Hey, babe!”

Luke flinched away from Michael’s loud voice, barely audible over the clamor that was going on wherever Michael was. Luke made out someone calling for a new mic.

“Hey,” Luke rasped out and sat himself down on the lid of the toilet. His bones were aching with the emotional rollercoaster of the day.

“Sorry for the noise, I’m kinda busy right now. We’re doing a bunch of interviews right now. What’s up?”

Luke felt his lips press into a tight line. Looking down at his lap he noticed that his hand was shaking, so he balled it into a fist. 

“Something-” He sighed. “Something happened. Can you go somewhere else where it’s more quiet?” 

“Oh.” The nonchalant tone to Michael’s voice made Luke grit his teeth. He felt like he was about to throw up. “That sucks. I can’t go right now because the new interview starts in a few but I’ll try to listen here and then we can talk about it later, alright?” 

“Well, that’s just great,” Luke said. It came out much more venomous than he had intended. 

The beat of silence on the other end of the line told Luke that Michael had noticed. Luke could see Michael in front of him, a thousand foreign people surrounding him, his face melting into that pinched expression that cut a great deal of his sympathy away. Michael’s voice was so consoling it almost sounded patronising when he answered,  “Hey, Lukey, calm down. I’m busy right now, but I’m sure I’ve got time for you tonight.” 

“No, you don’t!” Luke exploded. His head was swimming with exhaustion and his blood was searing with anger. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Michael! And don’t fucking pretend that you’ve got time when you clearly don’t! Fuck you!” 

“Luke!” Michael’s yell was so indignant that it only fed to the cloud of anger in Luke’s chest. 

“No, I mean it! Fuck you! Remember what you promised me? That you’d try harder to make this work and what happened? You didn’t even last a week and we barely talked all month. And now, now when I for once really need you, you blow me off again? I’m done! This was your chance, Michael, and you just fucking blew it! I’m so fucking done! Fuck your interviews and fuck you and fuck everything! This is over! I mean that! Don’t bother coming back because you’ve got nothing left to come back to, you hear me? I never want to fucking see you again!”

Luke pressed down so harshly on the red call button that for a moment he thought he had broken it. His breathing was ragged and the guest room seemed to be closing in on him all of a sudden. Luke struggled with the lock for a moment before he managed to push the door open and make it back to the living room. 

“Here!” Luke threw Jack’s phone at him. “Don’t fucking pick up when he calls again!” 

Luke made a beeline for the back door. He didn’t stop when his brother called after him. Luke didn’t stop until he had left their garden and the willow beyond behind him. He kept moving forward until the undergrowth became too dense for him and he had to stop. Fearing that all the emotion coursing through his body was going to rip him apart otherwise, Luke screamed. His insides were tearing and Luke could feel his soul bleeding out through the cracks. As soon as he had reached the ground, he curled into a ball and kept wailing. 

It hurt terribly, the fear for his father and Michael’s absence. Michael, who had always been his tether and safety net, who was halfway around the world and hadn’t come back in almost a year. Luke felt the wound where every single day had cut another piece out of him and the missing he felt was so overwhelming it made him retch. But Michael was gone. Michael was gone, belonged to different people now and Luke could never allow him to come back. Not if it meant being torn apart like this ever again.  

When Luke picked himself off the ground eventually, he did so with a hole in his chest. But it wasn’t an open wound anymore. The sutures he had stitched so haphazardly over his heart hurt, and his bones ached now more than ever, but the pounding against the back of his head had receded and all that was left of Luke now was grim determination. No sound came over his lips as he began the track back to his house, no feeling was left in his chest as Luke let his hands glide over the high grass of the willow. 

  
  


**“We’ve gotta let go of all of our ghosts** **  
** **We both know we ain’t kids no more”** **  
** **\- Send My Love // Adele**

The street was eerily silent as Luke trudged down the street. He was thankful that the sun hadn’t fully risen yet, the dawn being easier on his eyes. Luke admitted that he was playing foul a little bit, approaching Michael’s house at that early of an hour. But if Michael was still sleeping he wouldn’t be fast enough to kick Luke out, and Luke would have the chance to mend them. 

He found the spare key under the stone with the purple  _ Welcome _ painted onto it, right where it always had been, and unlocked the front door. 

The house was silent and Luke was thankful for that too. He wasn’t keen on crossing neither Calum nor Ashton before he hadn’t gotten the chance to talk to Michael. Careful not to make too much noise, Luke tiptoed up the stairs, turned to the left and slowly pried open the door to Michael’s room. The blinds were closed, shutting out most of the light. 

Blindly, Luke navigated himself towards the bed and lowered himself to sit on the edge of it. 

“Michael,” Luke whispered. He frowned when he got no response. 

Narrowing his eyes, Luke leaned forward and groped around the bedside table until he had found the lamp. He flicked the switch and felt his heart skip a beat. Michael’s bed was empty, and so were the open drawers of his dresser.  _ No.  _ The word resonated hundredfold in his head.

Luke jumped up and bolted out of the room. He tried the bedroom of Michael’s parents first, and found nothing. Cursing, Luke sprinted down the stairs and checked the kitchen, the fridge that was now empty and even the outside terrace. Luke examined every nook and cranny of the Cliffords’ house, but the result stayed the same. They were gone, all of them. Michael was gone. 

Fighting to keep his lungs from seizing up, Luke hasted up the stairs again and returned to Michael’s room. He found in the en suite bathroom where thunder had struck. Luke took in the shards littering the floor, the remnants of the mirror above the washing basin glittering in multi-coloured specs, its frayed edges coated in scarlet. 

Slowly, Luke walked backwards, out of the ensuite and Michael’s room. His legs were numb where they carried him down the stairs. Luke left the house through the back door. He climbed over the low fence separating both the properties and collapsed onto the hard stones of his back porch. He pulled his knees to his chest and breathed, covering his eyes with his hands. 

Luke didn’t know how long he remained in this position. It was only when he heard his brother’s voice behind him that Luke bothered to open his eyes again. 

“Hey, Lewi. Are you alright?” 

Not finding the strength to look at his brother, Luke shook his head. 

“Do you wanna come in? It’s a bit early to sit outside all by yourself, don’t you think?”

“He’s gone,” Luke mumbled at his lap. 

Jack let out a huff as he sat himself down next to him, threw an arm around Luke’s shoulder. “What was that, Lewi?”

“He’s gone,” Luke repeated, too loudly, his voice too trembling. “Michael’s gone. I… he left.” 

Jack let out a low hum. “I’m sorry.” 

Luke shook his head. 

“But you know,” Jack continued, “maybe this is good. Maybe this is for the best. I mean look at you, Luke. He’s been back for five minutes and you’re… you look bad again. Like you were after dad’s heart attack. He messed up and pissed off before he had to deal with the consequences,  _ again _ . I’m not surprised and you shouldn’t be sad. He deserves nothing from you anymore, not your sadness and certainly not your love.” 

Luke pressed a hand to his mouth. He felt like he might throw up if he didn’t. “Don’t say that. Please, don’t say that. It’s my fault this time. I was stupid.” 

“So what.” Jack’s grip around him tightened and Luke let his head fall onto his brother’s shoulder. “Maybe it’s for the best this way. You’re so much better than him anyways. He can live his rockstar life and you’ll start uni in spring. Just you wait, one semester at uni and you’ve forgotten all about him.” 

Luke tried hard to swallow the sharp ache that unfolded in his chest at Jack’s words. Jack was right, in a way. And what it looked like, Luke didn’t have much of a choice anymore. But it wasn’t right. Not for him. Luke had known it all along, even if he had realised it too late. There was no forgetting for Luke. There was no life for him without Michael in it, for the both of them. They had proven themselves as much over and over again. Luke had just been too stubborn to accept it and Michael had been so far away. 

“You’re right.” Luke lied. “I’ll get over it eventually.” 

“Good.” 

Luke could feel his brother smile against his temple before he ruffled his hair. “I’m not gonna force you to come inside just yet, but don’t try to mope around too long, okay?”

“Promise.” 

Jack got up and went inside. Luke remained in his position for another stretch of time, just breathing. Eventually, he got up. 

 

**“The memories of our past, they give me power  
** **I will live, I will laugh, I’ll make you prouder”  
** **\- Paradise // XOV**

Michael hated the smell of hospitals, the incessant stench of death and antibacterial solution. He was thankful someone had opened a window in the small room he had entered. Out of all the things about Australia, Michael had missed the sun and perpetual smell of burnt earth among the most. Hospital rooms ousted both of these things, but Michael would deal. 

There was a singular bed pushed against the far wall of the room. A small, fresh bouquet of flowers was filling the air with sweet smell. In Michael’s opinion, the flowers only made the stench worse, but he knew that the gesture was more to calm minds instead of actually brightening up the room. 

Michael looked at Andy, felt his heart ache at the sight. Luke’s father had always treated him like a fourth son, even when Michael had begun to date his youngest in front of them. Seeing him lie in a hospital bed like this, with half a dozen machines around him and tubes sticking out of his skin, made Michael’s insides twist. It was just wrong. 

“Michael?” 

Instinctively, Michael squared his shoulders because that voice didn’t belong to the Hemmings he had hoped for, but he wasn’t about to leave because of that. Michael looked up and at Jack, who was hovering on the threshold of the hospital room. 

“Hey.” Michael inclined his head solemnly. “I came to visit your dad.” 

“I see that.” 

Michael wanted to sigh. When he had landed, he had tried the Hemmings’ house first. Michael had been welcomed by Ben, however, and Luke’s eldest brother, as well as Jack, had made it pretty clear to Michael what they thought of his return. Michael had left before any of them thought to remove him from the scene by force. 

He didn’t care about their opinion of him per se, but if the Hemmings brothers were that agitated it meant that Luke was hurting pretty badly, and that was something Michael cared about a lot. He had tried to explain to Jack and Ben that he was back to end Luke’s pain but they hadn’t been inclined to listen. So Michael had gone to the hospital instead, resorting to taking care of Luke’s dad while Luke himself was busy cooling off. 

Michael raised his hands. “I mean no harm.” 

“Too late,” Jack grunted and walked over to the bed. 

Michael took a step back, but leaned forward. “I’m here to make things right with Luke, but your dad means a lot to me, too, Jack, you know that.” 

Jack turned to look at him. His gaze was so intense that Michael felt the urge to take another step away from him but he stood his ground, let Jack level him as long as he felt necessary. Eventually, Jack averted his gaze. With a pinched expression he made sure all the tubes looked good, the solution hanging from the IV pole was dripping in even intervals into his father’s veins. 

His voice was calm as he spoke, “Do you love my brother?”

Michael huffed out a laugh. Jack was being ridiculous. “What kind of question is that?” 

“Do you love him?” Jack repeated, undeterred, and Michael felt the smile fade from his face. Jack was getting at something, Michael could tell by the wide set of his shoulders, the clenching of his jaw. He wasn’t sure whether he was going to like what Jack had to say. 

“More than anything.” 

Jack nodded, infinitesimally. “Leave.” 

“What?”

Jack looked at him. “My brother broke up with you, so leave. He obviously doesn’t love you anymore, shouldn’t anyways so you should leave.” 

“No… no, you’re wrong.” Michael shook his head, couldn’t help the grin that pulled his lips apart. Michael got that Jack tried to play up his big brother role, but he really was wrong. “This is just a bump in the road. You know Luke. He’s a little bit pissed off at the moment, but he’ll calm down soon and then we’re gonna be fine in no time. We always are.” 

Jack crossed his arms in front of his chest. “And you’re sure about that?” 

“Of course I’m sure about that.” Michael felt himself mirror Jack’s position, jutted his chin out a little. He knew that he probably looked like a petulant child doing so, but Jack was being ridiculous trying to teach Michael something about the boy he loved. Even if Jack was said boy’s brother. 

“Okay.” Jack nodded and somehow Michael didn’t get the impression he had convinced the other man. “If you say so, let’s do it like this. Wait for him to come to you.”

Michael furrowed his brows. “What do you mean?” 

“Easy.” Jack smiled in a way that left Michael queasy, but he wasn’t about to back down now. “You’re going to respect him. You’re going to respect the space he needs right now and wait for him to calm down. You wait for him to call you. Let him see to his wounds and leave until he asks you to come back.” 

Michael stared at Jack. Then he smiled. “Sure.” Michael shrugged. Jack really didn’t know anything. 

Jack nodded, his lips pressing into a hard line. Afterwards, he focussed back on his father and Michael knew the conversation was over. Michael casted one last look at Luke’s dad in the hospital bed, then he made a beeline for the door. 

Once he had left the hospital building, he took several minutes to breathe the stench out of his system, swallow the taste off of his tongue. Next, Michael pulled out his phone. He wasn’t allowed to call Luke, but that didn’t mean he would lose any time taking care of him. 

“Zoe?” he asked once their band’s assistant had picked up. It still felt weird, having people work for him and having those people actually do what he asked them to. 

“Michael? How are you? Is everything alright?” 

Michael smiled. “Yes, I’m fine. No need to call the PR guys.” 

Michael pretended to not hear the relieved sigh Zoe let out. 

“I’ve got something else, though.” 

“Sure, whatever you need. That’s what I’m here for.” 

Michael nodded at no one. “I need you to get in contact with my bank. I want to transfer a bigger amount of money.” 

Zoe chuckled. Michael could hear her pen scrap over paper. “You planning on buying yourself a car?” 

“No, my father-in-law is in the hospital. I want his bill covered.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” 

“Yeah.” Michael looked up at the cold concrete walls, the ugly mint-coloured windows. “Yeah, me too.”

Zoe hummed. “But that’s fine. I’ll take care of it and have everything ready for you to sign once you’re back. Speaking of which, when do you think that will be?”

Michael began walking towards the car park, retrieved the key for his rental car from his back pocket. “I’ll drop by my parents and then I’m on the next flight home. Arrange that too, please.” 

“The next flight? Didn’t you want to stay for longer?” 

“Yes.” Michael couldn’t help but frown at the sour taste of his tongue. “But there has been a change of plans.” 

“Okay.” Michael hated the concern in her voice. “Everything alright, Michael?” 

Michael smiled. Everyone was doubting him today, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

“Everything is fine.” 


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome, welcome to the finale of this fic or rather: how many 5sos song references can I squish into a single chapter and yes it's over ten. I am so happy and proud and just exhilarated to be able to present you this last chapter. As I said in the beginning, this fic has been a long, long time coming and to see it done truly means a lot to me. So thank you for sticking by me and giving this fic a chance and (hopefully) enjoying it as much as I enjoyed writing it. As always, and one last time for this fic: Enjoy!

  **“Come up to meet you, tell you I’m sorry  
** **You don't know how lovely you are”** **  
****\- The Scientist // Coldplay**

Luke sat on his window sill, one leg hanging into his room, the other dangling in the air. If he reached out a little, he could touch the leaves of the tree in front of his window. He refrained from doing that, though. The fall seemed yet a little bit too painful to be risked. Dusk was breaking and the air was getting colder, more bearable. Luke took a sip of the tea his mum had brought him, watching the sun vanish beyond the roofs of his own, beloved suburbia. 

Jack had been so nice as to reassure their mother that Luke didn’t look sick because he was heartbroken but rather because he was actually coming down with something. His mother had been up in arms in minutes and apart from the tea Luke also had a bowl of chicken noodle soup waiting on his desk. He didn’t feel particularly hungry. 

A loud yell from the ground floor reassured him that his entire family had gathered around the TV to watch the rugby game that was on tonight. Luke was thankful that everyone else was busy while he pretended to be asleep. He was exhausted, so much that it hurt when he blinked. He couldn’t go to sleep yet, however. 

Setting the empty mug down on the sill in front of him, Luke pulled out his phone. He forewent his contact list and instead typed the number from memory. Then he pressed the phone to his ear. As he had hoped, the connection went straight to voice mail. 

“Hey,” Luke rasped out and cringed at his own voice. But it was too late now, the voice mail was recording and he had to say what he had to say now, or he would never find the courage again. “Hey. I don’t know how we got to this point. When I think about it, when I think about my life from seventeen years old until now, two years later, really, it’s like I’m looking at the sea and no matter how much I try, I just can’t seem to be able to see the bottom of it. You’re clear, though. I never had a problem seeing you. So please, for this, try to see me.”

Closing his eyes, Luke inhaled. 

“I’m sorry for the things that I’ve done, for the things that we’ve done to each other. And I don’t know whether we can ever forgive each other for that. But I’m calling… fuck I’m calling because I’m willing to try, Michael. I just need you to know that I don’t care whether you’re famous now because the world may have changed but you and I haven’t.” 

Luke heard himself utter a half-sob half laugh. 

“I don’t know what to do now, Mikey. I fucked up. Now it’s me, I guess. But- and please try to believe me this because I know you won’t and- what I’m trying to say is, I didn’t sleep with Will. I tried but I couldn’t. You told me to make a decision and I wanted to choose him, but I wasn’t able to. And that’s because of you. There was never a choice. Just you.”

Luke laughed again, pulled at his own hair.  

“You’re it, Michael. The one, always the one, over and over the one and I can’t live without you. Truthfully, I’ve been in love with you since I was four years old and I don’t know how to not love you. You never gave me a chance. Fuck, that’s probably the only truth in this whole mess. I love you. And I know- I hope that you love me too, still. You told me once that you were absolutely willing to do what’s necessary so that we could be together.

“And that,” Luke swallowed, “as long as there are clouds in the sky you and I would be together. There are clouds in the sky every day and you’re not here because I hurt you, because I was stupid and didn’t think and I honestly thought something as trivial as some overly zealous fans of yours were bad enough to keep me from you. I’m sorry for that, Michael. But if you could love me again, I could let go of all of that. I’m willing to let go of everything, for you. I’m here. I’m here and I’m yours, just like I always was. So take this heart, my heart, and put yourself in it, if you can. I love you. I’ll always just love you. If you can, come back to me. Okay-” 

The  _ bye _ at the end of his speech got cut off by the beep of the recording limit. With shaking fingers, Luke pressed the confirmation button as the automated voice asked him whether he wanted to send the voice mail. Now that the words were out there, Luke felt lighter, almost light enough to climb the branches of the tree up to their highest point. Instead, Luke let himself fall back into his room. He set his phone and the empty mug down on his desk, then he let himself fall onto his bed. Not bothering to take his clothes off, Luke buried his head in his pillow.

 

 

 **“Whisky and rum, blood on my tongue** ****  
**You haunt me”** **  
** **\- You Haunt Me // Sir Sly (Amtrac Remix)**

Michael regretted drinking the moment the liquor slid down his throat. It was way too expensive to taste so shitty, but then Michael had always hated alcohol. He hated the taste of it and how it alleviated the ugly parts of him that he struggled to keep in check on the daily as it was. These days, however, the ugly parts of him was all that he had left and Michael didn’t care. He needed the liquor to make him not feel a thing.

Michael made it through half of the bottle until his throat finally stopped protesting. He filled one more glass with the shimmery whisky before he walked from the living room cabinet into his room. His laptop was still sitting where he had left it on the desk. It came to life with a press of his finger and a swipe of his thumb.

Michael signed out of all his public social media accounts first and then logged back in with a private account, the same build-up for every website. On that email, his profile was a nondescript picture of a motor bike and a name he had made up with one of those name generators online. There was nothing leading back to his persona, neither famous nor private. More importantly, this account had access to his past.

Michael scrolled through twitter and found nothing of interest. His parents didn’t know how to use the platform and Michael had no interest in seeing what the people from his high school years were doing. He left a like on the pictures of his old friends posing in front of the club where they were playing their first own show and congratulated Inigo on his new girlfriend. Michael made a mental note to give Jayden a call some time. Maybe he could hook them up as his own band’s support for the Australian leg of their upcoming tour. It would be good to reconnect with people that knew him. Michael closed the tab and opened another.

He took a big swig of his whisky before he did the inevitable. Most nights Michael wasn’t self-destructive enough to stalk himself through Luke’s social media, but today had been a long day filled with business meetings where he had to sit and listen to people that long depended on him and not the other way around and Michael felt like he deserved it, especially because he had signed all the papers Ashton had approved of and with that they were in for a second album. A celebratory cause. So Michael allowed himself to witness all that he was missing and all that he had once had.

Luke’s facebook was filled with pictures of a dog - apparently his brother had gotten himself a French bulldog - and some promotional posts he had shared from the official website of his parents’ coffee shop. Michael studied the way Luke was wearing his hair done up in a quiff now, and how his final growth spurt had made Luke’s shoulders broader than those of even his brothers. Michael saved the pictures that hurt the most. He emptied out his glass once he began seeing posts he already knew and scrolled back up.

It was hard to keep track of time with a schedule like his, and it happened that Michael didn’t even know what month it was. Time was relative to him now, he counted from concert to concert and interview to interview instead of days. How many had passed he often times only realised when he saw it number on his screen, saw how much the other half of him had changed. Michael was about to close the tab when his eyes caught on a post he had scrolled over before, a status update that made Michael’s heart catch in his throat.

# 

Michael started at the screen, read the post over and over. He blinked, hoped the letters would change, but they didn’t. Blue on white, it told him that his boyfriend was in a relationship with another man. Michael only flinched when he felt a stinging jolt of pain.

He looked down and frowned at the mess on his dress pants. They were covered in glass shards, the front of his dress shirt soaked in liquor and splatters of blood which was gushing out of his hand. Carefully, Michael dropped the remnants of the glass he had held and inspected the damage on his hand. He didn’t feel more than a dull pounding in his palm, but Michael knew that that was due to the fact that the alcohol was numbing his pain. A silent, hysteric sob escaped him as he remembered who usually stitched him up whenever he was so stupid as to fuck up his body. Michael suppressed the rest.

Calmly, he stood up. He pressed his hand to his shirt (the suit was ruined now anyways and Michael hadn’t been fond of it in the first place), while walking into the kitchen. Michael watched the deep scarlet covering his hand fade into rusty brown as he held his hand under cold water. With his unscathed hand, he pulled his phone out of his back pocket.

It rang three times before his bandmate picked up. The slur to Ashton’s vowels told Michael that his friend was drunk too, just in a much more socially acceptable manner.

“Mike!” Ashton cheered into the receiver, making Michael cringe. Apart from alcohol itself, drunk people annoyed the fuck out of him. “Where are you? You should come to the club Cali and I are at! I’m pretty sure Paul van Dyk is here, isn’t that awesome?”

Michael sighed inaudibly and made sure to enunciate every word as clear as possible as he said, “Ashton, listen to me for a moment, please.”

“Ohh.”

Michael squinted as Ashton’s voice faded and was replaced by the sound of the club.

“Mike?”

Michael sighed in relief as he heard Calum’s voice, clear and sober.

“Calum.”

“What’s up, man?”

“There has been a change of plans.” Michael shut the tap off and lifted his hand to his eyes. Cleaned, the cut in his palm was about the length of a safety pin. Nothing that he couldn’t patch up himself. “Remember how we wanted to go to Bali for our second album retreat?”

“Yeah, we wanted to fly in two weeks if I recall correctly. Wait, Mike, please don’t tell me you have to push it back because I also wanted to see my sister this break and-”

“Don’t worry, Cal,” Michael interrupted his bandmate. “I’m not cancelling anything. We’re just not going to Bali anymore.”

“Okay... and where are we going then?”

“Home,” Michael replied. “My home.”

“You mean Australia?”

Michael nodded at no one. “My parents’ old house belongs to me now. We can stay there, far away from any and all cameras. Just us and the music.”

“I thought you hated your hometown. And suddenly you wanna go there? Is there a reason for that, or… ?”

“Yeah.” Michael smiled and balled his injured hand into a fist. The pain cut through the drunken haze like a knife, cleared his head. “A reason, one reason, the only reason, over and over the same thing. I was just wrong a bit, wasn’t I? But that’s fine. Nothing I can’t fix.”

“Mike, what are you talking about?”

“I gotta get something back. But that doesn’t matter right now. I’ll explain you guys everything tomorrow. Just be back for like… breakfast.”

Calum huffed on the other end of the line, but it sounded distinctively more like a laugh. “You know, you should get your own place some time.”

“I have a place.”

“In _Australia._ ”

“Details,” Michael wanted to wave his hand before he remember the open wound and aborted the motion at the last moment. “Bring Ash back home safely.”

“I always do.”

Michael smiled, for real this time. “See you tomorrow.”

“See ya.”

Calum hung up and Michael let his phone clatter onto the kitchen table. Then he made his way into the living room. The bottle of whisky was still sitting on the cabinet where he had left it. Michael took another swig, then he took the bottle with him back into the kitchen and stuffed into the trash can below the sink. Wrapping his wound into a dish towel with the help of his teeth, Michael stumbled through the his bandmates’ flat before he pushed the door to his room open and let himself fall onto his bed. He didn’t sleep for another couple of hours. By the time he did, the bleeding in his hand had stopped.

 

 **“There’s some nights, we’re worlds apart** ****  
**Not this time, no goodbyes”** **  
** **\- Wild Ones // You Me At Six**

The day Luke’s phone rang was a hot summer day. As a season special, the coffee shop had added smoothies to their menu and the shop was bustling. Luke was kept busy, especially now that they were a man down ever since Will had quit. Luke didn’t feel the need to complain though. He was thankful that work was keeping him busy, kept his mind from drifting. He worked over hours these days, signed himself up for double shifts so he was too tired in the morning to think and too exhausted in the evening to do anything but crash on his bed and sleep.  

Luke was handing strawberry frappuccinos out to a group of preteen girls when his phone began to vibrate in his back pocket.

“Mum, I’m stepping out for a sec!” he called out to his mother who was standing in front of the coffee grinder. She waved him off and Luke hasted through the break room onto the back street that was cleared for delivery vehicles only. Luke looked at the sky as he pulled the phone out of his pocket and pressed it to his ear.

“Hello?”

For several moments, there was nothing but breathing on the other end of the line and Luke frowned. He was about the check the caller ID when he got an answer and his heart skipped a beat. He didn’t have to look anymore.

“Luke Hemmings.”

His name. His name were the first words Michael Clifford spoke to him three months after he had waltzed back into Luke’s life and one after Luke had broken them irreparably. Or so he had thought. Hearing Michael’s voice was enough to make Luke’s heart beat twice as fast in his chest. His eyes stayed glued to the sky as he rasped out a “Michael?”

“Hey,” Michael said and Luke didn’t know how he felt about the fact that Michael sounded about as wrecked as Luke felt.

“Hey,” Luke gave back and barely suppressed the urge to punch himself in the face. Quickly, he added, “You called.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you- uhm, did you get my voicemail?”

“Yeah.”

The hope that had so cruelly snuck back into his body made his stomach flip. Luke waited for Michael to say something. When he didn’t, Luke inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. He pictured Michael, not how he was now, but who he had been. The Michael he had been able to talk to as easily as breathing came to him. The Michael he knew he had the chance, the only and last chance, to get back now.

“It’s the truth. All of it.”

“All of it?” Michael asked and Luke knew what he was referring to it.

“Yes,” Luke confirmed. “I meant everything I said. I didn’t sleep with Will. I couldn’t. It wasn’t… it was never him. But you know that. I’m sorry for taking so long. ”

Luke could hear Michael shift at the other end of the line. Michael let out a noise that was either a sob or a burst of laughter and Luke didn’t know which possibility devastated him more.

“You’re an idiot, Lukey,” Michael said eventually and now it was on Luke to hiccup his emotion. The nickname was balm on his soul, the fond tone to Michael’s voice a blessing.

“I know.” Luke rubbed his eyes, couldn’t help the painful grin that split his face apart. And it was so easy, talking to Michael. “Trust me, I know.”

“I’m sorry, too. For everything. Everything from the moment I left you for the first time. I never should have done that. Fuck the fame if I can’t have you.”

Luke’s heart pounded so hard in his chest he thought it might jump out of his rib cage. But Luke knew it wouldn’t. His heart was way too light to do any damage.

“It’s your dream, Michael,” he said.

“You’re my dream.”

Slowly, Luke pried his eyes open where his head was still tilted upwards. The sky was one stretch of perfect blue.

"I looked at the sky today,” Luke said and he thought that this, this might have been the bravest thing he had ever done. “There were so many clouds."

It took a long time for Michael to speak, but he did eventually. Five words. Five words and Luke smiled, smiled because he got his forever back.

"I'm taking the next plane."

**Author's Note:**

> So, there it is. Fin. We made it! Thank you again for your support and all the kudos and comments and messages on my social medias that kept me motivated and carried us here. If you haven't yet, check out the [8tracks playlist](http://8tracks.com/capncatherine/have-you-heard-me-on-the-radio-did-you-turn-it-up) Cat made, or even the [spotify version](https://open.spotify.com/user/1146343083/playlist/38Hppwc6cbA6cDhc4bioK1) that I listened to while writing. 
> 
> If you liked it, also maybe please help me spread the word and reblog the [fic edit](http://mikeykink.tumblr.com/post/146773779861/clouds-by-thesoulsailor-on-ao3-pairings-michael). As a kind of bonus material, there are also [character aesthetics](http://mikeykink.tumblr.com/tagged/clouds-aesthetics) that I compiled for Luke, Michael and Will (if you were wondering what he looks like.)
> 
> [Tumblr](http://mikeykink.tumblr.com/)/[twitter](http://twitter.com/mikeykink) is @mikeykink as always. And with that, I fear, we have to let go of this one. 
> 
> All the love, as long as there are clouds in the sky, xx Carly


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